Ewan Birney

Ewan Birney CBE FRS FMedSci
Birney in 2014
Born	John Frederick William Birney[8][9][10] (1972-12-06) 6 December 1972 (age 51)[11][12][13][14] Paddington, London,[13] England
Other names	Ewan Birney John Birney[7]
Education	Eton College
Alma mater	University of Oxford (BA) University of Cambridge (PhD)
Known for	GeneSweep[15] ENCODE consortium[16] Ensembl genome database project[17]
Spouse	Barley Laycock ​ (m. 2003)​ [13][18]
Children	Two[13]
Awards	Crick Lecture (2003)[1] Overton Prize (2005)[2] Ben Franklin Award (2005) EMBO Member (2012)[3][4]
Scientific career
Fields	Bioinformatics[5] Genomics[5] Computational Biology[5]
Institutions	University of Cambridge European Bioinformatics Institute European Molecular Biology Laboratory Oxford Nanopore Technologies Genomics England Sanger Institute Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Thesis	Sequence alignment in bioinformatics (2000)
Doctoral advisor	Richard Durbin[6]
Website	ewanbirney.com

John Frederick William Birney (known as Ewan Birney)

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.^{[31][32][when?]}

Research and career

From 2000 to 2003, Birney organised a

As of 2015^[update], Birney's research group focuses on

Birney serves as a consultant to Oxford Nanopore Technologies^[86] and on the scientific advisory board of the Earlham Institute (formerly TGAC) in Norwich.^[87][88] Since 2022, he has served on the governing board at Eton College.^[89]

Awards and honours

In 2002, Birney was named as one of the

As expressed by his nominators, Birney has been a significant force in Open Source in Bioinformatics and science. He has been a strong advocate for making genome information freely available to all. His work co-leading the Ensembl project has made high-quality genome annotation available freely over the web, preventing a class system of labs which can and cannot afford to pay subscription fees to proprietary data. The project has worked hard to make the data available in a variety of ways to make the data accessible and easily available for mining. The Ensembl project has been open-source from the outset, enabling researchers and corporations alike to reuse and extend the software system. Birney has been an advocate of open science as well. Along with Sean Eddy, he criticised journal decisions to allow papers to be published without releasing the genome sequence data at the same time. He is also the author of the freely available Wise package of tools, which are important parts of genome annotation pipelines. He serves as a co-leader of the open-source bioinformatics toolkit Bioperl and also co-founded and currently serves as president of the Open Bioinformatics foundation, an organisation that support the development of several bioinformatics toolkits.

Birney was awarded membership of the

Ewan has grown to be a force in genomics due to his innovation in genome analysis, both algorithmic and integrative analyses. He wrote the first error tolerant, splice aware protein alignment program, used in the human and subsequent genome analysis; he co-authored one of the first and most widely used short read assemblers. In terms of data integration, Ewan has led the analysis in many genomic consortia, in particular ENCODE, leading the integration of many genomic assays; for example making robust predictions of enhancers, promoters, and their integration with disease associated regions. He also co-developed many widely used bioinformatics resources.

Birney has been awarded an

Birney married in 2003[18] and has two children.^[13]

References