Dr Sameer Velankar is the Section Head for Macromolecules, Structure, Chemistry and Bioimaging at EMBL-EBI. He’s also a senior scientist at EMBL and leads the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) team. The central theme of his scientific career is enabling the use of macromolecular structure data by developing advanced data analysis, data query and visualisation tools to support fundamental and translational research and education. His team has been a founding member of worldwide consortia that manage central macromolecular structure resources, including the Protein Data Bank (PDB), the PDBe-Knowledge Base (PDBe-KB), and the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, which was developed in collaboration with Google DeepMind. Before joining EMBL-EBI, Sameer worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University, UK, between 1997 and 2000. Sameer has a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science.