28 Facts About Ewan Birney

Ewan Birney serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge.

Ewan Birney previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Ewan Birney was privately educated at Eton College as an Oppidan Scholar.

Ewan 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.

Ewan Birney completed his PhD at the Sanger Institute, supervised by Richard Durbin while he was a postgraduate student at St John's College, Cambridge.

From 2000 to 2003, Ewan Birney organised a scientific wager and sweepstake known as GeneSweep, for the genomics community, taking bets on estimates of the total number of genes in the human genome.

Ewan 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.

Ewan Birney has played a role in annotating the genome sequences of the human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms.

Ewan Birney is known for his role in the ENCODE consortium.

Ewan Birney has contributed to several other projects including the Pfam database, InterPro, BioPerl, and HMMER and Ensembl genome database project.

Ewan Birney has supervised several PhD students and postdoctoral researchers that have worked in his laboratory.

Ewan Birney's research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Medical Research Council the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Wellcome Trust and the European Union.

Ewan Birney serves as a consultant to Oxford Nanopore Technologies and on the scientific advisory board of the Earlham Institute in Norwich.

Ewan Birney has served on the boards of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, German Cancer Research Center, The Institute of Cancer Research, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Institute Pasteur and Riken institute.

In 2002, Ewan Birney was named as one of the MIT Technology Review TR100 top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

In 2005 Ewan Birney was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics:.

Ewan Birney has been a strong advocate for making genome information freely available to all.

Ewan Birney's 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.

Ewan Birney has been an advocate of open science as well.

Ewan Birney is the author of the freely available Wise package of tools, which are important parts of genome annotation pipelines.

Ewan Birney serves as a co-leader of the open-source bioinformatics toolkit Bioperl and co-founded and currently serves as president of the Open Bioinformatics foundation, an organisation that support the development of several bioinformatics toolkits.

Ewan Birney was awarded membership of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2012 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.

Ewan Birney has grown to be a force in genomics due to his innovation in genome analysis, both algorithmic and integrative analyses.

Ewan Birney 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 Birney 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.

Ewan Birney has been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degrees: in 2014 from Brunel University London and in 2021 from University of Tartu, Estonia.

In 2015, Ewan Birney was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Ewan Birney was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 New Year Honours.