Niklas Blomberg
ELIXIR Director
Niklas Blomberg is the Director of ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for bioinformatics and life-science data, based in Hinxton, UK. He currently coordinates EXCELERATE - and EU H2020 project with 45 partners and 29 M€ funding to develop the ELIXIR infrastructure and CORBEL (35 partners, 14M€) to drive interoperability between European life science research infrastructure.
Niklas holds a BSc in Chemistry from Göteborg University and a PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg where he worked on structural bioinformatics and protein NMR spectroscopy in the group of Michael Nilges. In 1999 he joined AstraZeneca’s Structural Chemistry Lab in Mölndal, Sweden as a computational chemist and has during his 12 year tenure with AZ worked on topics such as fragment-based lead generation and compound screening collection enhancements. As Associate Director of Computational Chemistry he led the global cheminformatics group, located in UK and Sweden for 6 years. In 2011-2013, he built a new, cross-disciplinary team for Computational Chemistry and Computational Biology to support Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmune research from target nomination to clinical candidate nomination. He is an industry advisor in national eScience initiatives, until recently chair of BILS, the Swedish ELIXIR node, and has co-chaired the IMI Open PHACTS initiative.