2025 RDKit UGM Recap
The 2025 RDKit UGM took place last week (September 10-12, 2025) in Prague. This year’s installment of the meeting was organized by Martin Šícho at the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague. From my perspective the meeting went very well: the logistics were smooth, the technology mostly worked - we had some problems with sound on the first day, but got past those (why is it always sound?), and the program had a good balance of talks and breaks. Many thanks to Martin and the Prague group for putting together a great meeting and to the companies that sponsored the meeting (listed in the github repo) for enabling us to continue to run the meeting without having to charge registration fees.
We had 120 registered attendees; as usual we were at capacity (the limiting factor was the size of the lecture hall). This year we only had a couple of no-shows (a common problem with free meetings). We had the usual good mix of academic and industrial attendees and of people in different stages of their careers. The meeting was live streamed over zoom and there were typically 40-60 people watching the talks remotely and participating via the discord server.
There were 19 standard talks (we did a mix of 20- and 30-minute slots this year and I think that worked pretty well), 10 lightning talks, and 20 posters. On Friday we had the hackathon and three workshops. I haven’t heard much feedback about the workshops yet, but there were a number of pull requests submitted to the RDKit repo during the hackathon and in the next couple of days, so it looks like that was productive.
The github repo is here: https://github.com/rdkit/UGM_2025. The slides from the presentations will show up in the repo as speakers send them to me or submit PRs themselves. I will be uploading the videos of the talks to the YouTube playlist over the next few weeks as I have time to process them.
I, unsurprisingly, really enjoyed the meeting. I was exhausted at the end of each day, and totally wiped out on Friday, but that’s 100 percent expected. Some personal thoughts/impressions:
- I had never been to Prague before and very much enjoyed the bits of it I saw. The UGM itself kept me busy during the days, but the area around the campus was quite lively and I did get to see some other parts while running (pro tip: don’t try and run along the river in the afternoon… there are way too many people out and about! Early mornings were a lot more runnable).
- As always, it was great to see old friends and meet new people. My tendency, particularly during meetings like this, is to spend most of my time talking to people I already know, but I think I did a decent job this year of tempering that.
- It was really nice to have all four RDKit maintainers (Brian, Paolo, Ricardo, and myself) together in one place. I’m not sure when the last time that happened was.
- The quality of the talks was good. We had a couple that were more marketing-heavy than I would of liked, but they were definitely the exception. As usual, there was a nice mix of academic and industrial, method-development and application, deeply technical and high-level.
- One recurring theme this year was the handling of sequence-based entities and/or polymers. There were several talks that touched on this topic from different angles and I’m really curious to see how this will evolve in the RDKit. This is an area where I don’t have a lot of personal experience, so it’s going to be fun for me to see how the RDKit community tackles this.
I came back from the meeting with a long list of things I want to work on in the RDKit, and that’s a really good sign. I hope that other attendees came away similarly inspired!
I will announce the dates and locations of the 2026 European UGM as soon as they are finalized. If you are interested in hosting a future UGM, please get in touch with me.