From 9 to 15 September, second-year master's students of Chemistry, junior researchers of the Laboratory of Biologically Active Compounds and Biocomposites Tatiana Lavrova and Maxim Chelyukanov undertook an internship at the Scientific and Educational Centre of Infochemistry of the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO).

Its background is as follows.

On 24 May, Tula State University hosted a 'Science Café' event. Students, postgraduates, faculty members from the Natural Science Institute and the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, as well as employees of research laboratories, had the opportunity to meet with Ekaterina Vladimirovna Skorb, Doctor of Chemical Sciences, Professor, and Director of the ITMO Infochemistry Research Centre. She provided an overview of the research areas being pursued and announced that the centre offers internship opportunities.

Tatiana and Maksim showed interest and expressed their desire to do an internship. Vyacheslav Arlyapov, Director of the BioChemTech Research Centre, contacted Ekaterina Vladimirovna to discuss the Master's students' request and received approval.

Tatiana and Maxim were interns in one of the areas of infochemistry - ‘Chemistry + Artificial Intelligence. Using machine learning models for various tasks in chemistry’. They were supervised by ITMO students Ilya Tonky and Rodion Golovinsky. Ekaterina Vladimirovna Skorb herself provided general supervision.

Tatiana and Maxim learned the Python programming language and wrote machine learning models.

- We gained invaluable experience of working with programming languages and databases, and wrote models to predict the toxicity of antibiotics in milk," says Tatiana. - Of course, it is great that we managed to get an internship at ITMO! We will definitely use our new knowledge and skills in further research.

Tatyana Krikunkova 

Photo by the heroes of the article