Professor Dame Janet Thornton was Director of EMBL-EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR, the pan-European infrastructure for biological data, since its inception. Her research group focuses on understanding protein structure (function and evolution) and ageing using computational approaches. After a physics degree she completed her PhD at the UK NIMR before post doctoral studies at Oxford. She then held a joint appointment at University College London and the Bernal Chair in the Crystallography Department at Birkbeck College. Professor Thornton is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a member of EMBO and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences.