Ewan Birney facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ewan Birney
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Ewan Birney in 2014
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John Frederick William Birney
6 December 1972 Paddington, London, England
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| Other names | Ewan Birney John Birney |
| Education | Eton College |
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| Spouse(s) |
Barley Laycock
(m. 2003) |
| Children | Two |
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| Thesis | Sequence alignment in bioinformatics (2000) |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Durbin |
Ewan Birney (born John Frederick William Birney on December 6, 1972) is a leading scientist. He works with DNA and genes. He is a joint director at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). This institute is in Hinxton, England. He is also a deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).
Birney helps lead Genomics England. This group uses genetic information to improve healthcare. He also chairs the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. This group works to share genomic data safely worldwide. He is an honorary professor at the University of Cambridge. He teaches about bioinformatics.
Ewan Birney has done a lot for genomics. He created new tools for bioinformatics and computational biology. These tools help scientists understand genetic information. He also worked at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
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Ewan Birney's Education Journey
Ewan Birney went to Eton College. This is a private school in the United Kingdom. Before university, he did an internship. He worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. There, he learned from famous scientists. One of them was James Watson, who helped discover the structure of DNA.
Birney studied Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. He earned his first degree in 1996. Later, he got his PhD from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. His research focused on sequence alignment. This means lining up DNA or protein sequences. It helps scientists compare them.
While he was a student, he also did other internships. He worked in the office of the Mayor of Baltimore. He also worked in finance.
Ewan Birney's Research and Career
From 2000 to 2003, Birney ran a fun science contest. It was called GeneSweep. Scientists guessed how many genes were in the human genome. They also guessed about non-coding DNA. This is DNA that does not make proteins.
Birney helped create the Ensembl genome browser. This is a website that lets scientists look at genes. He also helped sequence the Human Genome in 2000. This project mapped out all human genes. He also worked on the ENCODE project. This project studies how genes work.
Birney has helped annotate genomes. This means adding notes and explanations to gene sequences. He has worked on human, mouse, and chicken genomes. His research group studies computational genomics. They look at how people's genes are different.
Key Tools and Projects
Ewan Birney is well known for his work on the ENCODE project. Before ENCODE, he helped create many important tools. These tools are used in bioinformatics. Some tools he made include PairWise, GeneWise, and GenomeWise. He also worked with other scientists on tools like Exonerate and Velvet assembler.
He also helped with other big projects. These include the Pfam database and InterPro. These databases store information about proteins. He also contributed to BioPerl and HMMER. These are software tools for biology. He also worked on the Ensembl genome database project.
As of 2015, Birney's team studies genomic algorithms. They look at differences between individuals. This includes humans and other animals. Many PhD students and researchers have worked with him. His research has received funding from many groups. These include the Wellcome Trust and the European Union.
Birney advises Oxford Nanopore Technologies. This company makes DNA sequencing devices. He also serves on the board of the Earlham Institute. Since 2022, he has been on the governing board at Eton College. He has also served on other important science boards.
Awards and Honours for Ewan Birney
In 2002, Ewan Birney was named a top innovator. MIT Technology Review listed him as one of the top 100 innovators under 35. In 2003, he gave the first Crick Lecture at the Royal Society.
In 2005, he won the Overton Prize. This award was for his work on open source bioinformatics. Open source means the software code is free for everyone to use. He also won for his work on BioPerl. He also led the Ensembl genome project.
In 2005, Birney also received the Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics. This award recognized his efforts to make genome information free. He believed everyone should have access to this data. The Ensembl project made high-quality genome information available online. This helped prevent a "class system" in labs. Labs that could not pay for data could still access it.
Birney also supports open science. He believes scientists should share their data. He criticized journals that published papers without releasing the data. He also wrote the free Wise package of tools. These tools are important for understanding genomes. He helped lead BioPerl. He also co-founded the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. This group supports bioinformatics tools.
In 2012, Birney became a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). In 2014, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). This is a very high honour for scientists.
His election certificate praised his work in genomics. It noted his new ways of analyzing genomes. He wrote the first program that could align proteins even with errors. He also helped create one of the first widely used tools for assembling short DNA reads. He led the analysis for many genome projects, like ENCODE. He helped combine different types of genomic data. This led to better predictions of enhancers and promoters. These are parts of DNA that control genes.
Birney has received honorary Doctor of Science degrees. These were from Brunel University London in 2014 and University of Tartu in 2021. In 2015, he became a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2019, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). This is an honour from the British monarch.
Personal Life
Ewan Birney got married in 2003. He has two children.
