Alvis Brazma is a Senior Scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) - European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Cambridge, UK. He has worked in the discipline of bioinformatics-the science looking at biology from the perspective of information-from its very earliest days. He has published over 150 scientific papers on a wide range of subjects, from computer science to biology (and the links between the two), including in the highest impact journals such as Nature and Science, and has been cited almost 50,000 times.