Janet Thornton

DBE FRS FMedSci FRSC (born 23 May 1949)^[8] is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).^[12][13][14] She is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function.^{[2][15][16][17]} She served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.^[11]

head girl.^[9] After graduating in physics from the University of Nottingham, Thornton completed a master's degree in biophysics at King's College London, and a PhD in biophysics at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London in 1973.^[18]

CATH^[24] classification of protein structure.^{[4][6][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]} Her group developed a robust enzyme classification, comparison and annotation tool – the EC-BLAST^[32] which calculates similarity between enzymes based on chemical reactions by capturing the bond change(s), reaction centre(s) or structural similarity between them.^[33][32]

EMBL's scientific delegates.^[34] Her research has been funded by the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC),^[13][35] the Wellcome Trust, and the European Union

David Jones.^[5]

European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2000,^[1] a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2014. Thornton is a supernumerary fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.^[8][38] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2017.^[39] Thornton's nomination for the Royal Society reads

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. In the 1970s at Oxford (with M J Sternberg) she established clear and useful rules for the handedness of B-a-B units and demonstrated valid methods for prediction of the ordering of strands in B-sheets. At Birkbeck she developed this work to define families of conformations in B-hairpins and aB-links where the structures had previously been assumed at random. She 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. The atlas is used widely in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry. At University College she has developed studies of sidechain conformation and stereochemistry into a procedure, PROCHECK, for evaluating the quality of experimentally defined protein structures: this is used widely to check protein structures. She 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.^[40]

Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to bioinformatics.^[42] The Times named Thornton number 86 of their "Eureka 100" British scientists in 2010.^[43] She was awarded the Suffrage Science award in 2011.^[3]