Dr. John Hancock received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1980. He subsequently undertook postdoctoral training at the Max-Planck-Institut für molekulare Genetik in Berlin, Imperial College, London and the University of Cambridge before taking up a Research Fellowship at the Research school of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra. On returning to the UK in 1994 he took up a group leader post at the MRC’s Clinical Sciences Centre and was subsequently Reader in Computational Biology in the Computer Science Department at Royal Holloway University of London. In 2002 he took up the post of Head of Bioinformatics at the MRC’s Mammalian Genetics Unit. He has made contributions in a number of areas of biochemistry and bioinformatics, but is perhaps best known for his work on RNA secondary structure evolution and the role of simple sequences in gene and genome evolution.

Dr. Marketa J. Zvelebil obtained her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, under the supervision of Dr. Michael Sternberg, then worked for 2 years with Dr. Sternberg at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK). She then joined Professor Janet Thornton at her newly created Biomolecular Structure and Modelling Group at University College London, where she worked for 3 years before moving to the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research to serve as group leader in Bio- and Proteoinformatics. She holds a lectureship position at University College London. Her current research involves analytical and structural studies of domains involved in signalling, protein modeling, and drug/ligand binding and design. Her latest interest is in the use of systems biology to model and analyze various signalling pathways.