Michael Ashburner

Professor of Biology, University of Cambridge. Joint Heat, European Bioinformatics Institute. Ashburner's research focused on the structure and organization of genomes. In particular his research centered around the interpretation of genomic sequence data, with an emphasis on Drosophila. He contributed to understanding how hormones control temporal patterns of gene activities and to the structure and function of genes in Drosophila; he also researched the evolutionary origin of Drosophila. He was very involved in attempts to make robust databases for biologists.