Janet Thornton

BIOGRAPHY

FACULTY OF 1000:
Dr Thornton was appointed as a Section Head for Bioinformatics in 2011.

Acknowledgements:
I would like to acknowledge the help Matthew Bashton provides in compiling my evaluations for Faculty of 1000.

CURRENT POSITION
Director, EMBL-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute). 2001 -

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
After graduating in Physics, Janet studied for her Ph.D. in Biophysics at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London (1970-1973). She then moved to Oxford, where she worked in molecular biophysics with David Phillips until 1978 when she returned to London to the NIMR, and subsequently to a Fellowship at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 1990 she was appointed Professor and Director of 'Biomolecular Structure and Modelling Unit' at University College London and later was also appointed to the Bernal Chair in the Crystallography Department at Birkbeck College. In October 2001 Janet became Director of the EMBL – European Bioinformatics Institute on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus at Hinxton, near Cambridge. In the same year, she received the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) award. In 1999 Janet was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of EMBO in 2000; in 2002 she was appointed Extraordinary Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge and Honorary Professor, University of Cambridge and in 2003 she was elected a Foreign Associate Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She has also received honorary degrees from several universities.

The goal of Janet Thornton’s 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 her group, she studies the functions and interactions of proteins with other molecules in the cell from a structural perspective.