Professor Chris Rawlings: is Head of the Department of Computational and Analytical Sciences at Rothamsted Research. Chris began his career at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 1982 and since then he has published over 60 articles and edited several books on computational biology. For much of his career he has been involved in the development and application of bioinformatics software. Chris moved to Rothamsted Research in 2004 and he now leads the department of Computational and Analytical Sciences which comprises over 30 staff and students engaged in research into, and application of informatics and statistics to problems from the agricultural sciences. He is also responsible for Analytical Science and Insect Radar teams which generate data from plant, soil and water samples taken from Rothamsted field research programmes. Chris has personal research interests in the development and use of informatics methods for supporting network and systems biology and this research has produced open source bioinformatics software (http://www.ondex.org/; http://knetminer.rothamsted.ac.uk/ ) for data integration which has been used in the analysis of both crop and pathogen genomics datasets. Chris is increasingly involved in the use of informatics and data science methods in agriculture; going beyond molecular genotype to phenotypic and environmental data. He co-leads the Informatics work package in the UK Cross-Institute Wheat Research Programme (Designing Future Wheat) and is also a member of the International Wheat Information System (WheatIS) expert working group. Chris is a visiting Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and he was one of the founding members and former Vice President of the International Society for Computational Biology.