Dr Tim Hubbard is responsible for bioinformatics groups carrying out analysis and annotation of vertebrate genome sequence produced by the Sanger Institute and part of the strategy group organizing the Human Genome Project. He is joint head of the Ensembl genome annotation project ( www.ensembl.org), which is the leading database and access point for the human genome sequence. He is also co-author of SCOP, Structural Classification of Proteins Database ( scop.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/scop), which was one of the first biological databases to provide access via the web in 1994, and co-organiser of CASP, the bi-annual 'competition' to predict protein structures (predictioncenter.llnl.gov).

Following the controversy surrounding the ownership and access to the human genome sequence, he has become a leading advocate of the benefits of strong 'openness' for science and society as a whole (c.f. the open source software movement). He is involved in a number of NGO/Industry forums regarding scientific data access, patent systems and access to essential drugs, including Médecin San Frontières plan to set up a public domain drug development industry, DNDi.