Janet Thornton

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Janet Thornton (2017).

Dame Janet Maureen Thornton DBE , (born May 23, 1949 ) is a British bioinformatician . She is one of the pioneers in structural bioinformatics.

Life

Janet Thornton studied physics at the University of Nottingham , then went to the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in London, where she began her career in biological research studying dinucleotides . In addition to her PhD at NIMR, she earned a Masters degree in Biophysics from King's College London . In order to deepen her computer skills with a view to evaluating experimental data, she moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford , which was headed by David C. Phillips , as a research assistant after completing her doctorate in 1973 . In Oxford she started her work in the then new field of bioinformatics. In 1979 she left Oxford and went to Birkbeck College to continue her work on the structure-property relationships of proteins using special computer programs and large databases. From 1983 she was a lecturer at Birkbeck College. In 1990 she became a professor at University College London . From 1994 she worked simultaneously at Birkbeck College and University College London in various leading positions until 2001. From October 2001 to June 2015 she was Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The EBI is located together with the Sanger Institute on the grounds of the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge . Since July 2015 she has headed a research group at the EBI.

The work of Janet Thornton has made a significant contribution to deepening the understanding of the three-dimensional structure and function of proteins with the help of computer-aided methods. The tools and techniques developed by her and her colleagues enable the analysis of biological data and have the potential to have a major impact on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

Honors and prizes

literature

  • Nick Zagorski: Profile of Janet M. Thornton . In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . tape 102 , no. 35 , 2005, pp. 12296-12298 , doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0505819102 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Directory of Members: Janet Thornton. Academia Europaea, accessed January 10, 2018 (English, with biographical and other information).
personal data
SURNAME Thornton, Janet
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thornton, Janet Maureen (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British bioinformatician
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1949