Dr Guy Cochrane is the head of the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA). The ENA provides a comprehensive repository for public nucleotide sequence data, attracting users from a multitude of research disciplines and serving as underlying data infrastructure for numerous bioinformatics services. Under Dr Cochrane, the team has launched important new services, including the Sequence Read Archive for raw data from next-generation sequencing platforms and the CRAMtools sequence data compression platform. In addition to the leadership of a team of biological curators, bioinformaticians and software engineers, he contributes editorial work to a number of journals and meetings and has been involved in standardisation activities in many areas of bioinformatics. He received his PhD in cancer cell and molecular biology from the University of East Anglia in 1999 and carried out post-doctoral work in the molecular biology of photoreception at Cambridge University prior to joining EMBL-EBI.