John Hancock is a Visiting Professor at the School of Medicine University of Ljubljana and co-lead of the ELIXIR Systems Biology Community. During his career his interests have ranged from biochemistry to bioinformatics and evolutionary biology. He has carried out research on the evolutionary dynamics of repetitive sequences, from ribosomal RNAs to genomic sequences and proteins, and on the relationship between genotype and phenotype with an emphasis on semantic encoding of phenotype data using ontologies. He has also been engaged with science policy and bioinformatics infrastructure (in ELIXIR).