Keynote speakers

Janet Thornton and Obi Griffith will present at the SIB days 

We are honoured to have Janet Thornton as our opening keynote speaker of the SIB days 2024!

With a background in structural bioinformatics, Professor Thornton has made significant contributions to the understanding of protein structures.

Director of EMBL-EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, she played a key role in ELIXIR, the pan-European infrastructure for biological data, since its inception.

Janet’s research is focused on proteins, especially their structure, function and evolution. She is a computational biologist, working at the interface of biology with physics, chemistry, and computing. This includes a detailed analysis of enzyme biocatalysts, their mechanisms and the evolution of new functions. Her group is also investigating variants in developmental diseases and the molecular basis of aging. Her efforts have had a broad impact, advocating for open data and supporting the advancement of women in science. She played a key role in establishing ELIXIR, promoting data sharing across Europe. The Janet Thornton Fellowship is one of her initiatives aimed at fostering new scientific talent.

Janet Thornton is giving the Opening Lecture on Tuesday 25 June.

We are thrilled to announce Obi Griffith, Associate Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Genetics and Assistant Director of the McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University (St. Louis, USA) as our closing keynote speaker.

Dr. Griffith’s research is focused on the development of personalized medicine strategies for cancer. He develops bioinformatics tools and methods for the analysis of high throughput sequence data and identification of biomarkers for diagnostic, prognostic and drug response prediction. Dr Griffith is on the board of directors for the Cancer Genomics Committee, Steering Committee for the Global Alliance for Genomic Health, and co-chair of the Variant Interpretation for Cancer Consortium. He has published over 100 studies, received numerous research awards and honors and held several large grants from the NIH including a K22 Transition Career Development Award, U01/U24 awards for Development of Informatics Technologies for Cancer Research, and others. He has mentored more than 30 bioinformatics trainees and taught hundreds more as an instructor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops.

Obi Griffith is giving the Closing Lecture on Wednesday 26 June.