Christine Orengo

Christine Anne Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London (UCL) known for her work on protein structure, particularly the CATH database.

Orengo studied Chemical Physics at the University of Bristol where she was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree. She continued her studies at the University of Aberdeen where she was awarded a Master of Science degree in Medical Physics in 1977 for research on the disruption of iron metabolism in laboratory rats with Yoshida sarcomas. She was awarded a PhD for research on the redox properties of haem in proteins in 1984 from UCL.

Following her PhD, Orengo worked in industry before being appointed a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in Mill Hill where she worked until 1990. She joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UCL and in 1995 and was awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) Senior Fellowship in Bioinformatics. She was promoted to Professor of Bioinformatics in 2002.

Orengo's research analyses genes, proteins and biological systems using computational methods to classify proteins into evolutionary families. This work has been funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Orengo is co-editor with David Jones and Janet Thornton of the textbook Bioinformatics: Genes, Proteins and Computers. As of 2015, according to Google Scholar and Scopus her most cited work has been published in Nature, Nucleic Acids Research, Structure and the Journal of Molecular Biology.

Orengo was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2014.