Tim Hubbard

Tim Hubbard is Director of ELIXIR, the European life sciences infrastructure, and Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics at King's College London. Until March 2024 he was Senior Advisor at Genomics England, the company set up by the UK Department of Health to execute the 100,000 genomes project, where he was seconded from 2013. Since 2019 Genomics England has mainstreamed the use of whole genome sequence analysis in normal patient care, as part of the National Health Service (NHS) Genome Medicine Service. From the start Genomics England also enabled research access to genome and clinical data using a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) approach where data is not distributed but analysed in place to protect patient privacy and provide transparency on data use. Tim has led TRE policy work at Health Data Research UK (HDRUK), the national virtual institute setup in 2018 to unite UK's health and care data to enable discoveries that improve people's lives. The TRE approach has recently been adopted as policy by NHS England.

Until 2013 Tim was Head of Informatics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute where he was one of the organizers of the sequencing of the human genome. In 1999 he co-founded the Ensembl project to analysis, organize and provide access to the human genome and from 2007 led the GENCODE project to annotate the structure of all human genes. Prior to that he studied biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, followed by a PhD in protein design at the Department of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London and postdoctoral fellowships at the Protein Engineering Research Institute in Osaka under the EU scientific training program in Japan and MRC Centre, Cambridge.