Attwood undertook
postdoctoral research at Leeds until 1993, when she moved to
University College London for five years before moving to the
University of Manchester in 1999. Her research concerns protein
sequence alignment and
protein analysis. Inspired by the creation of
PROSITE, Attwood developed a method of
protein fingerprinting and used this to establish the
PRINTS text-mining consortium, the EMBER bioinformatics education consortium (including
EBI and
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics as partners), and the
EPSRC PARADIGM Platform. She is the Manchester
principal investigator on projects SeqAhead (
Next-generation sequencing data analysis network) and AllBio (bioinformatics infrastructure for unicellular, animal and plant sciences), and was also Manchester
PI on EMBRACE and EuroKUP (kidney and urine proteomics). Attwood was a member of ELIXIR's Bioinformatics Training Strategy Committee (Work Package 11) during ELIXIR's preparatory phase. She is currently Chair of the
EMBnet Global Bioinformatics Network, she was a member of the Executive Committees of the
International Society for Biocuration, and the Bioinformatics Training Network, and was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology. In 2012, she spearheaded the establishment of a GOBLET (Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training), with the major bioinformatics, computational biology and biocuration societies, networks and organisations as partners. , Attwood is the Chair of the
GOBLET Executive Board. As well as being a
biocurator she has co-developed tools to align and visualise protein sequences and structures, including Ambrosia and CINEMA. The group are building re-usable software components to create useful bioinformatics applications through
UTOPIA (Bioinformatics tools), and are developing new approaches for automatic annotation and
text mining, like PRECIS, METIS, BioIE, and semantic approaches to data integration, such as the Semantic
Biochemical Journal published by
Portland Press. The
UTOPIA tools underpin both the Semantic
Biochemical Journal and a collaborative project with
Pfizer and
AstraZeneca to develop a 21st-century interface to biomedical literature and data management. Attwood's research has received funding from the
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the
Wellcome Trust, the
Royal Society, the
European Union and industry.
Teaching Attwood teaches on
undergraduate and
postgraduate courses and has been
doctoral advisor or co-supervisor to several PhD students (e.g.,
Manuel Corpas). Attwood has co-authored several book chapters and three popular bioinformatics textbooks:
Introduction to Bioinformatics and
Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution. Attwood is a co-author of the
bioinformatics textbook
Bioinformatics Challenges at the Interface of Biology and Computer Science: Mind the Gap with
Steve Pettifer and Dave Thorne.
Academic service Attwood serves on the
editorial board of the
Biochemical Journal,
Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation,
Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, the
Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling and the
EMBnet.journal. Awards and honours Attwood held a
Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) from 1993 to 2002. ==References==