Dame Janet Thornton awarded Royal Society’s Croonian Medal and Lecture
The award recognises the central role of big data and bioinformatics in the life sciences.
Dame Janet Thornton has been awarded the Royal Society's premier lecture in the biological sciences. Credit: Jeff Dowling/EMBL-EBI
Dame Janet Thornton has been awarded the Croonian Medal and Lecture by the Royal Society for her pioneering work in protein and structural bioinformatics. The award recognises Thornton’s research on using computational analysis to understand the structure, function, and evolution of proteins. Her group’s research focused on enzymes and the effect of protein-coding variants in disease and ageing.
Thornton was Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) between 2001 and 2015, overseeing the growth of the institute from 160 to over 600 people. She led a small research group at EMBL-EBI before retiring in 2024.
“The Croonian Medal, first awarded in 1738, is an immense honour that I am very proud to receive from the Royal Society,” said Thornton in a statement to the Royal Society. “I had the amazing good fortune to be part of the huge progress over the last 50 years to understand the molecular biology of life, and particularly the structures and functions of our proteins. Yet there are still many aspects of this complex interacting system to be discovered. With the recent improvements in AI methods, applied appropriately and combined with carefully curated accurate data, the next 50 years hold even more promise to understand, predict, and modulate biology in vivo.”
The Croonian Medal and Lecture was created by William Croone FRS, one of the original Fellows of the Royal Society, and has been awarded annually since 1738. Professor Edith Heard, EMBL’s former Director General, received the 2025 award for her work as a leading figure in X-chromosome biology.
“The recipients of this year’s medals and awards have made exceptional contributions to science and research culture,” said Sir Paul Nurse, President of The Royal Society. “Their work has helped further our understanding of the world around us and will inspire generations of scientists to come.”
