Cyrus Chothia FRS is an emeritus scientist at the Medical Research Council

Medical Research Council (UK)

The Medical Research Council is a publicly-funded agency responsible for co-ordinating and funding medical research in the United Kingdom. It is one of seven Research Councils in the UK and is answerable to, although politically independent from, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills...

 (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Laboratory of Molecular Biology

The Laboratory of Molecular Biology is a research institute in Cambridge, England, which was at the forefront of the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s, since then it remains a major medical research laboratory with a much broader focus.-Early beginnings: 1947-61:Max...

 (LMB) and emeritus fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge

Wolfson College, Cambridge

Wolfson College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Wolfson is one of a small number of Cambridge colleges which admit only students over the age of 21. The majority of students at the college are postgraduates, with around 15% studying undergraduate...

.

After his Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 research under Peter Pauling at University College London

University College London

University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...

, Chothia worked in the LMB for three years. He then worked for Michael Levitt

Michael Levitt

Professor Michael Levitt FRS is a British biophysicist. He has been Professor of Structural biology, Stanford University, California, since 1987 working in computational biology and bioinformatics....

 at the Weizmann Institute of Science

Weizmann Institute of Science

The Weizmann Institute of Science , known as Machon Weizmann, is a university and research institute in Rehovot, Israel. It differs from other Israeli universities in that it offers only graduate and post-graduate studies in the sciences....

  followed by two years with Joel Janin at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.

In 1976 Chothia returned to England to work at University College London and the LMB. With Arthur M. Lesk

Arthur M. Lesk

Arthur M. Lesk, is an accomplished protein science researcher, who is currently a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.- Profile :...

 he showed that proteins adapt to mutations by changes in structure.

In 1992 he proposed that most proteins are built of domains that come from a small number of families. He collaborated with Alexey Murzin, Steven E. Brenner

Steven E. Brenner

Steven E. Brenner is a professor at the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California Berkeley, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, and San Francisco...

 and Tim Hubbard to create the Structural Classification of Proteins

Structural Classification of Proteins

The Structural Classification of Proteins database is a largely manual classification of protein structural domains based on similarities of their structures and amino acid sequences. A motivation for this classification is to determine the evolutionary relationship between proteins...

 (SCOP) database, a periodic table for all known protein structures. With Julian Gough to create the SUPERFAMILY

SUPERFAMILY

SUPERFAMILY is a database of structural and functional annotation for all proteins and genomes.The SUPERFAMILY annotation is based on a collection of hidden Markov models, which represent structural protein domains at the SCOP superfamily level....

 database which uses Hidden Markov models to identify protein sequences that are related to those of known structures.