Professional Title: Head of the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), EMBL-EBI
Bio: Dr. Guy Cochrane leads the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), a platform for the management, sharing, integration and dissemination of sequence data. ENA includes, on the technical side, core databasing infrastructure for the rapid archiving of petabytes of sequence data and, on the content side, extensive public domain data from over a million species. Providing the European node of the celebrated long-standing International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, Dr. Cochrane is an authority on large-scale international sequence data sharing. Under the COMPARE project, Dr. Cochrane led the adaptation and extension of ENA for the purposes of rapid global pathogen data sharing. This system is used as a foundation for the European COVID-19 Data Platform (https://www.covid19dataportal.org/), which Dr. Cochrane leads. With a background in cancer research and 16 years of experience in bioinformatics services, Dr. Cochrane has driven numerous developments within the sequencing informatics world, notably leading the development of global next generation sequence data infrastructure and comprehensive submission, archiving and presentation services in the late 2000s, sequence data compression software, and most recently a portfolio of tools and services around data coordination including the “data hubs”. Current work includes a host of data coordination projects around pathogens, environmental microbiology, biodiversity and agricultural species and ongoing technology development. He has been involved in integration and standardisation activities in such areas as pathogen genomics, taxonomy, functional annotation, genomics and metagenomics, not least as board member of the Genomics Standards Consortium and co-chair of the Global Microbial Identifier working group on 'Repository and Storage of Sequence and Meta-data’ for pathogen surveillance data.
