19 Facts About Janet Thornton

Janet Thornton is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function.

Janet Thornton served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.

Janet Thornton was Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute from 2001 to 2015, on the Wellcome Genome Campus at Hinxton near Cambridge.

Janet Thornton was an organiser of the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and European Conference on Computational Biology joint Conference in Glasgow in 2004.

Janet Thornton's work is highly interdisciplinary, interfacing with structural biology, bioinformatics, biological chemistry and chemoinformatics, amongst others.

Janet Thornton was an early pioneer in structure validation for protein crystallography, developing the widely used ProCheck software.

Janet Thornton's research has been funded by the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the European Union.

Janet Thornton has supervised several PhD and postdoctoral researchers including Sarah Teichmann and David Jones.

Janet Thornton was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999.

Janet Thornton became a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2000, a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014.

Janet Thornton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2017.

Janet Thornton is distinguished for her contribution to understanding protein three-dimensional structure: her perceptive comparative studies have led to the development of algorithms that are used to analyse and make predictions of supersecondary and tertiary structure.

Janet Thornton has made the most comprehensive and useful analyses of tertiary interactions of protein sidechains, leading to an atlas that is valuable for protein and ligand design.

Janet Thornton has presented a method, known as threading, which gives strong evidence about tertiary structure for a protein sequence which is not obviously homologous to any other known structure.

Dame Janet Thornton is Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute and is a world leader in bioinformatics.

Janet Thornton has contributed significantly to medical science by increasing our fundamental understanding of the structure of proteins and how they contribute to disease and ageing.

Janet Thornton is actively pursuing the challenge of how to join up biological and medical data in the UK and building tools which will facilitate the exploitation of these data for research and in the clinic.

Janet Thornton was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to bioinformatics.

Janet Thornton was awarded the Suffrage Science award in 2011.