Janet Thornton

Royal Society, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, ELIXIR

Professor Dame Janet Thornton is a research scientist. She is widely credited, alongside others, with the establishment of the new field of Bioinformatics.  She graduated in physics before completing her PhD in Biophysics. After research at Oxford University, Birkbeck College and UCL, she became Director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, Cambridge from 2001 – 2015. During this time, she led the establishment of ELIXIR - the ESFRI distributed infrastructure for life sciences information. Today, as a Senior Scientist at EMBL-EBI, she works on proteins and the impact of variants on diseases. Professor Dame Janet is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation as well as a foreign association of the US National Academy of Sciences.  She combines her research with many advisory roles, including serving as Vice President of the European Research Council (2018-2020).