23-MAY-1949 :- BIRTH OF Janet Thornton, British scientist.

Dame Janet Maureen Thornton
(born 23 May 1949) is a British scientist, and Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute. She is one of the world’s leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function.

After her PhD, Thornton worked in molecular biophysics with David Chilton 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 Hinxtonnear 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. In January 2014, she announced her intention to step down as Director of EBI from July 2015.

Thornton's work is highly interdisciplinary, interfacing with structural biology, bioinformatics, biological chemistry and chemo informatics, amongst others. She was an early pioneer in structure validation for protein crystallography, developing the widely used ProCheck software. Together with Christine Orengo, she introduced the CATH classification of protein structure.

From 2008 to 2012, she co-ordinated the four year preparatory phase of the European life sciences data infrastructure ELIXIR. As of 2013 she remains on the ELIXIR board as one of EMBL's scientific delegates. Her research has been funded by the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the European Union.