Janet Thornton

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Professor Janet Maureen Thornton CBE, FRS (born 1949) is Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute on the Genome Campus at Hinxton, near Cambridge, UK. She is one of the world’s leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, interfacing with structural biology, bioinformatics, biological chemistry and chemoinformatics, amongst others. Together with Prof. Christine Orengo, she introduced the CATH classification of protein structure.

After graduating in physics from the University of Nottingham, Janet Thornton completed her PhD in Biophysics at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London in 1973. She then worked in molecular biophysics with David Phillips at the University of Oxford. In 1978, she returned to the National Institute for Medical Research, and following that took up to a Fellowship at Birkbeck College, part of the University of London. In 1990 she was appointed Professor and Director of the Biomolecular Structure and Modeling Unit in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University College London and later also was appointed to the Bernal Chair in the Crystallography Department at Birkbeck College. Since 2001 she has been Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus at Hinxton near Cambridge. She was an organiser of the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) and European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) joint Conference in Glasgow in 2004.

Janet Thornton was elected to the prestigious position of Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999. She was awarded the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2000. She became a member of Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2000, and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Prof. Thornton is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.