Allyson Lister received her undergraduate degree in Biology/Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations from Rice University and a Master's degree in Bioinformatics from the University of York. She then spent 6 1/2 years as part of the UniProt team at the European Bioinformatics Institute. She is now a Research Associate and PhD student at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on data integration, ontologies and data standards, specifically in the area of systems biology. For more information, please see my profile page (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/iah/staff/profile/a.l.lister), or my personal blog (http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com).