Dr Rob Finn leads EMBL-EBI’s Microbiome Informatics team, which is responsible for the MGnify resource, which provides access to the metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and assembly analysis services. The functional and taxonomic profiles of these datasets, once made public, can be access by all via the MGnify website. The team is also responsible for the HMMER website, which enables fast proteins sequence similarity searches against a range of sequence and profile HMM databases. Rob also has a small research group that probes the functions of microbial 'dark matter'.
Rob joined EMBL-EBI from the Janelia Research Campus in the US, where he led a group that designed fast, web-based, interactive protein-sequence searches and annotations. Between 2001 and 2010, he was the project leader for Pfam at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK. Rob’s academic background is in microbiology and he holds a PhD in biochemistry from Imperial College, London.