Conference Chairs


Janet Thornton Janet Thornton

European Bioinformatics Institute
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
The Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Cambridge, United Kingdom

Janet Thornton is an EMBL Senior Scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), leading a small computational research group focused on proteins and their 3D structure and evolution. Her recent research explores how enzymes perform catalysis by gathering relevant data from the literature and developing novel software tools, which allow us to characterise enzyme mechanisms and navigate the catalytic and substrate space. In parallel, she investigates the evolution of these enzymes to discover how they can evolve new mechanisms and specificities. The practical goal of this research is to improve the prediction of function from sequence and structure and to enable the design of new proteins or small molecules with novel functions. Her research was recognised by election to the Royal Society in 1999 and election as a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2001. She was awarded a DBE in 2013. She recently stepped down as Director to return to scientific research.

website: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/thornton




Yves Moreau Yves Moreau

Stadius Centre for Dynamical Systems, Signal Processing and Data Analytics
KU Leuven, Belgium

Yves is currently a professor of engineering at the University of Leuven and does research on computational methods for diagnosis and disease gene discovery in congenital genetic disorders. He teaches several bioinformatics courses, mainly focusing on probabilistic models in computational biology. An associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and a co-founder of two spin-off starts of the university (Data4s, now part of Norkom Technologies, specialized in data-mining for the banking industry, and Cartagenia, specialized in IT solutions for clinical genetic diagnosis). Yves chaired the 2010 edition of the European Conference on Computational Biology.

He received the Master in Electrical Engineering from the Faculte Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium in 1992. Thanks to a Fulbright grant, went on to complete a Master in Applied Mathematics at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. In 1994, he moved back to Belgium at K.U.Leuven ESAT-SCD, where he received a Ph.D. in 1998. Between 1998 and 2005, Yves was a postdoctoral researcher (FWO-Vlaanderen) and assistant professor at ESAT-SCD, developing our bioinformatics research. In 2003-2004, he was a visiting researcher at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark. Since 2004, Yves have been a lecturer and professor at ESAT-SCD and currently coordinated SymBioSys, the K.U.Leuven Center for Computational Systems Biology. He is also the program director of the Master of Bioinformatics.