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 graduate courses in different areas of chemical information, CHEM 6011, CHEM 6012, CHEM 6013, and CHEM 6014, one of which is required for every chemistry Ph.D. student at Penn, and her teaching was honored in 2024 with the Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Member of the Non-Standing Faculty. 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 M.S. 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 the Special Libraries Association Chemistry Community, which she currently chairs.  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 is a former member and chair of the Board of Trustees of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC).