Janet Kelso has a broad interest in quantitative approaches to understanding genome evolution and the molecular basis of phenotypic variation and disease susceptibility. Her group has worked extensively on the analysis of ancient genomes and have a special interest in the development of novel software for processing and analysis of high-throughput sequence data from ancient samples and the use of computational approaches to gain insights into genome evolution.

Janet received her PhD in bioinformatics from the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape under the supervision of Professor Winston Hide developing an ontology for classifying gene expression data for which she won the L'Oreal women in science fellowship.  She is author of more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Together with Alfonso Valencia, Janet is the co-Editor-in-chief of the journal Bioinformatics, and also an editor of the journal Database. She is an active member of the Board of the International Society of Computational Biology