Ewan Birney

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footnotes = spouse = He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools.

Education Birney was privately educated at Eton College as an Oppidan Scholar. Before going to University, Birney completed a gap year internship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory supervised by James Watson and Adrian Krainer.

Birney completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford in 1996, where he was an undergraduate student at Balliol College, Oxford. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge while based at the Sanger Institute, and supervised by Richard Durbin while he was a postgraduate student at St John's College, Cambridge. His doctoral research used dynamic programming, finite-state machines and probabilistic automatons for sequence alignment. for the genomics community, taking bets on estimates of the total number of genes (and noncoding DNA

Birney is one of the founders of the Ensembl genome browser and other databases, and has played a role in the sequencing of the Human Genome in 2000 and the analysis of genome function in the ENCODE project. He has played a role in annotating the genome sequences of the human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms. His research group focuses on computational genomics and inter-individual differences in human and other animals.

Birney is known for his role in the ENCODE consortium. Prior to the ENCODE project, Birney has been involved in creation of a number of widely used bioinformatics and computational biology tools, either directly (PairWise, GeneWise, GenomeWise, ), or in collaboration with students and postdocs, e.g. Exonerate (with Guy Slater), Enredo (Javier Herrero ), Pecan (Benedict Paten ), the Velvet assembler (Daniel Zerbino ) and CRAM (Markus Hsi-Yang Fritz, Rasko Leinonen and Vadim Zalunin). Birney has also contributed to several other projects including the Pfam database, InterPro, BioPerl, and HMMER and Ensembl genome database project.

, Birney's research group focuses on genomic algorithms and studying inter individual differences, in both human and other species. He has supervised several PhD students and postdoctoral researchers that have worked in his laboratory. His research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Medical Research Council (MRC) the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI),

Birney serves as a consultant to Oxford Nanopore Technologies and on the scientific advisory board of the Earlham Institute (formerly TGAC) in Norwich. Since 2022, he has served on the governing board at Eton College. He has also served on the boards of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), Institute Pasteur and Riken institute.

Awards and honours In 2002, Birney was named as one of the MIT Technology Review TR100 top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2003, he gave the inaugural Francis Crick Lecture at the Royal Society:

Birney was awarded membership of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) His certificate of election and candidature reads:

Birney has been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science (DSc) degrees: in 2014 from Brunel University London and in 2021 from University of Tartu, Estonia. In 2015, Birney was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci). Birney was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours.

Personal life Birney married in 2003 and has two children.