Ewan Birney
- 3 min read
- 3 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Genomics, Biochemistry and Finite-state machine
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 Sanger Institute, 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.
While he was a student he completed internships in the office of the Mayor of Baltimore and also in financial services on valuation of options for the Swiss Bank Corporation.
Sign in to keep reading
2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Research and career
From 2000 to 2003, Birney organised a scientific wager and sweepstake known as GeneSweep, for the genomics community, taking bets on estimates of the total number of genes (and noncoding DNA) in the human genome.
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.
As of 2015, 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), the Wellcome Trust and the European Union.
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.
Personal life
Birney married in 2003 and has two children.