Kerstin Howe was born in Germany. She studied Biology at the Ruhr University of Bochum in Germany where she had her diploma in 1994 and after a year working in industry returned to university to obtain a  PhD in genetics in 1999 (1,2). After she finished her PhD, she worked for one year at this university in the general and molecular botany group on assembling and annotating mitochondrial sequences. 

Kerstin always preferred computational biology to lab work and counted herself lucky to join the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, as a Senior Computer Biologist in August 2000, initially annotating the human genome (2). She soon moved on to become a programmer in the wormbase team, annotating and building the reference databases for C. elegans genome (1–3).

When the Sanger Institute started a new flagship project sequencing the zebrafish genome in 2001, Kerstin got tasked with its gene annotation and from 2002 led the Zebrafish Genome Analysis Team.

This work led to Kerstin’s involvement in founding of the Genome Reference Consortium maintaining the human and mouse reference genome assemblies, in 2008, together with relevant teams at the NCBI, Washington University St. Louis (now the McDonnell Genome Institute) and EMBL-EBI (4–6).

Kerstin is still involved in the GRC and since 2021 heads the genome assembly production of the Tree of Life Department at the Sanger Institute, generating highest quality reference assemblies for multiple large biodiversity genomics projects. The largest of these is the Darwin Tree of Life project, aiming at sequencing and annotating all 70,000 eukaryotic species in the British Isles  (4–6).