Ewan Birney
Joint Associate Director and Senior Scientist
Dr Birney is one of the founders of the Ensembl genome browser. Together with Dr Rolf Apweiler, he has strategic responsibility and oversight for bioinformatics services at EMBL-EBI. Dr Birney played a vital role in annotating the genome sequences of the human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms; this work has had a profound impact on our understanding of genomic biology. He led the analysis group for the ENCODE project, which is defining functional elements in the human genome. Ewan’s main areas of research include functional genomics, assembly algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information (in particular information associated with individual differences) and compression of sequence information. He completed his PhD at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute with Richard Durbin, and worked in the laboratories of leading scientists Adrian Krainer, Toby Gibson and Iain Campbell. Ewan has received a number of prestigious awards including the 2003 Francis Crick Award from the Royal Society, the 2005 Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award for contributions in Open Source Bioinformatics.
birney [at] ebi.ac.uk
Tel:+44 (0)1223 494 420 / Fax:+44 (0)1223 494 468
Research
Find out about research activity in the Birney research group
Birney projects
There are two teams involved in EBI Services that report directly to Ewan Birney. The Technology & Science Integration team focuses on exploring new technologies for service provision, in particular in the context of pan-European initiatives. The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Team is the global authority for assigning human gene names and the coordinator, Elspeth Bruford reports directly to Ewan Birney.
Services
Team members
