Sectors: Policy, Research and Academia. 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 using computational approaches. 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. 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 (ISMB) 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.