Top PI Janet Thornton: Europe’s Big Data pioneer

Janet Thornton is stepping down as director of the European Bioinformatics Institute after 15 years. A seasoned European grantee, she explains to Catie Lichten that she has enjoyed her cross-European perspective and still finds Big Data exciting.

How did you start working in computational biology? 

I studied for a masters in biophysics at King’s College London, which was actually a lifesaver for me because I had studied physics and it really introduced me to biology. My PhD, at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, was on nucleic acids, and I was doing computing but I was really the only person involved in what’s now computational molecular biology. There wasn’t a field of bioinformatics at the time.