The University of Manchester was created by bringing together The Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST, two of Britain's most distinguished universities, in 2004. Around 4,300 academic and research staff teach more than 28,000 undergraduate and more than 11,000 postgraduate students across 400 degree programmes. The University hosts arguably the largest bioinformatics research group outside the EBI, with strong research programmes in molecular and genome evolution, comparative and organismal biology, computational biology, and structural and functional systems.

Terri Attwood is a biophysicist by training, having received her BSc and PhD from the University of Leeds in 1982 and 1984. In postdoctoral research, she became interested in protein sequence and structure analysis, and in 1993, was awarded a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship to develop tools for computational analysis of protein families: the first 5 years of the fellowship were held at University College London, and the last 4 at the University of Manchester, where she became Professor of Bioinformatics in 2001. She continues to work on protein sequence analysis (especially of G protein-coupled receptors), and is founder and co-author of various databases (e.g., PRINTS, InterPro, CADRE) and software tools (e.g., CINEMA, Utopia). More recently, her interests have extended to semantic integration of research data with scholarly publications, in order to bring static documents to ‘life’ – in a pilot project with Portland Press Ltd., the Semantic Biochemical Journal was launched in 2009, powered by Utopia Documents (http://utopia.cs.man.ac.uk/).