Janet Kelso, is Bioinformatics research group leader and Minerva Professor at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Her research interests include analysis of ancient genomes, primate comparative genomics and gene expression and the development and application of ontologies for biomedical applications. Her group uses computational approaches to gain insights into genome evolution in primates and have a special interest in the development of novel software for processing and analysis of high-throughput sequence data.
Janet received her PhD in bioinformatics from the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape under the supervision of Professor Winston Hide working on an ontology for classifying gene expression data for which she won the L'Oreal women in science fellowship.  She is author of more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Together with Alfonso Valencia, Janet is the co-Editor-in-chief of the journal Bioinformatics, and also an editor of the journal Database. She is an active member of the Board of the International Society of Computational Biology and has held the positions of  both Vice-president and secretary of the society.