Throughout her career, Dr. Kirsten Howe has focused on delivering high-quality genome assemblies for open use by the global research community. In her current role within the Tree of Life Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, one of the principal contributors to the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), she oversees the end-to-end genome assembly production pipeline. This spans wet-lab sample processing and sequencing through to assembly generation and curation, downstream analyses, and the tracking, visualization, and dissemination of data. To date, they have released nearly 4,000 reference genome assemblies for the Darwin Tree of Life Project, the Vertebrate Genomes Project, Project Psyche, the Aquatic Symbiosis Genomics Project and others, with plans to scale up further. She chairs the EBP’s Sequencing and Assembly Subcommittee and the International Scientific Committee, contributing to the EBP’s scientific mission.