Judith Currano

Judith Currano is the head of Penn's Chemistry Library. Since 1999 she has been responsible for developing the electronic and print collections in chemistry. Judith has extensive experience in chemical information retrieval, structure and substructure searching for compounds and reactions, and sequence and structure searching for proteins and nucleotides. She teaches a half-credit graduate course in chemical information, CHEM 601, which is required for the PhD in chemistry at Penn. In 2016, she received the Special Libraries Association’s Rose L. Vormelker Award for teaching and mentoring students and professionals, and, in 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society in recognition of her work in chemical information and chemical information education, as well as her service to the ACS.

Judith holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry and English from the University of Rochester, where she did independent research in a synthetic organic chemistry laboratory, and a MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an active member of the American Chemical Society, where she has chaired the Division of Chemical Information, and the ACS Committee on Ethics, and of the Special Libraries Association Chemistry Division.  Judith's research interests center around teaching chemical information, structure-based information retrieval, and research and publication ethics, as they apply to the chemical sciences.  She currently serves as the faculty advisor to Penn's Women in Chemistry group and a member and former chair of the Board of Trustees of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC).