BBSRC Council member
Professor Christine Orengo is a member of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) Council.
Christine is a Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at University College London, whose core research has been the development of robust algorithms to capture relationships between protein structures, sequences and functions.
She has built one of the most comprehensive protein classifications, CATH, used worldwide by tens of thousands of biologists, and central to many pioneering structural and evolutionary studies.
CATH structural and functional data for hundreds of millions of proteins has enabled studies that revealed essential universal proteins and their biological roles, and extended characterisation of biological systems implicated in disease, for example in cell division, cancer and ageing.
CATH functional sites have revealed protein residues implicated in enzyme efficiency and bacterial antibiotic resistance. This data also identified genetic variations likely to be driving human diseases and the drugs that can be repurposed to offset the pathogenic effects.
Christine is a President Elect of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB).
She is a co-founder and leader of the ELIXIR European 3D-BioInfo Community in Structural Bioinformatics and co-chair of the Genomics England Functional Effects Domain.
Christine is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, an Elected Member of EMBO since 2014, and a Fellow of ISCB since 2016. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2019.
Period of appointment: 1 April 2021 to 31 March 2025.
Last updated: 25 August 2023