Dr Alex Bateman joined EMBL-EBI as the Head of Protein Sequence Resources in 2012. He took over from Rolf Apweiler as the PI for the UniProt grant (an international collaboration between EBI, SIB and PIR) and has oversight for protein and ncRNA related databases at EMBL-EBI. Prior to that, he managed the production of numerous popular biological databases such as Pfam and Rfam at the Sanger Institute. He was formerly a member of and Chairman of the ISB's Executive Committee. He was also Executive Editor for Bioinformatics and Editor of NAR's database issue.