Tim Hubbard
Tim Hubbard is Professor of Bioinformatics at King’s College London. From 2024 to 2026 he served as Director of ELIXIR, the European Research Infrastructure for biological data. ELIXIR coordinates bioinformatics projects across its 23 member states and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), including the EU funded Genome Data Infrastructure (GDI) for the Beyond 1 Million Genomes (B1MG) project. He is also a member of the Technical Advisory Group for Genomics (TAG-G) at the World Health Organisation. Between 2013 and 2024 he was seconded to Genomics England for the 100,000 genomes project, mainstreaming whole genome sequencing in the National Health Service (NHS). He has been an advocate of “Trusted Research Environments” (TREs) to enable research on health data without data distribution to protect privacy, building on experience developing and operating the Genomics England TRE. The planned Secure Processing Environments (SPEs) of the European Health Data Space (EHDS) expand this model to support federated data analysis across EU member states as does GDI for B1MG.
Until 2013 he was Head of Informatics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was one of the organisers of the sequencing of the human genome. In 1999 he co-founded the Ensembl project to analysis, organise and provide access to the human genome and from 2007 led the GENCODE project to annotate the structure of all human genes. Between 1996 and 2007 he was an organiser of the biannual Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP), evaluating methods to solve the protein folding problem, which was substantially solved by the AI Alphafold in 2020.