Janet Thornton - Biography#

Since 2001 Janet has been Director of the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus at Hinxton, near Cambridge, UK. EMBL-EBI provides core bioinformatics services, especially public biological data for genome and protein sequences and structures, small molecule data and integrated proteomic, metabolomics and transcriptome information. The institute also performs investigator led bioinformatics research.

In addition Janet is an EMBL research group leader and the goal of her research is to understand biological processes at the molecular level, by studying protein structures and sequences using computational approaches. Her work involves the classification of protein families and structures to elucidate the principles governing their folding and evolution with a recent focus on protein variants and their effects on function. Her group is also involved in studies to understand the molecular basis of ageing.

Janet coordinated the ELIXIR preparatory phase (2006 – 2013) and leads the commission-funded BioMedBridges project, which clusters the biomolecular sciences research infrastructures to provide data bridges and ensure data interoperability between them.

Janet has worked on various government committees to address the bioinformatics and training challenges of genomic medicine.