Background
Thornton, Janet was born on May 23, 1949 in Middleton, United Kingdom.
Thornton, Janet was born on May 23, 1949 in Middleton, United Kingdom.
After graduating in physics from the University of Nottingham, Thornton completed a master"s degree in biophysics at King"s College London, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Biophysics at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London in 1973.
She is one of the world’s leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She was formerly director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR. 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.
Thornton was Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) from 2001 to 2015, on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus at Hinxton near Cambridge.
She was an organiser of the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (Istituto Superiore Mario Boella ) and European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) joint Conference in Glasgow in 2004. Thornton"s work is highly interdisciplinary, interfacing with structural biology, bioinformatics, biological chemistry and chemoinformatics, 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 European Molecular Biology Laboratory"s scientific delegates.
Her research has been funded by the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) and the European Union.
Royal Society; National Academy of Sciences]
She became a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (European Molecular Biology Organization) in 2000, a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2003 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014.
Daughter of James S and Kathleen (Barlow) McLoughlin. Married Alan D Thornton, July 25, 1970. Children: Alexander, Hazel.