Professor Dame Janet Thornton was Director of EMBL-EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and has played a key role in ELIXIR, the pan-European infrastructure for biological data, since its inception.

EMBL-EBI is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an inter-governmental organisation with 21 member states and two associate member states. Its aim is to help scientists realise the potential of ‘big data’ in biology, and to exploit complex information to make discoveries that benefit mankind. It manages the world’s public biological data, makes it freely available to the scientific community, and provides professional training in bioinformatics.

Janet’s research group focuses on understanding protein structure, function and evolution using computational approaches. After a physics degree, she completed her PhD at the UK NIMR before postdoctoral studies at Oxford. She then held a joint appointment at University College London and the Bernal Chair in the Crystallography Department at Birkbeck College.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences.