Ewan Birney
Director of EMBL-EBI
birney [at] ebi.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0001-8314-8497
Birney Group | EMBL-EBI
Birney Group
Director of EMBL-EBI
Birney Group
Director of EMBL-EBI
Director of EMBL-EBI
birney [at] ebi.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0001-8314-8497
Ewan Birney is the Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), which manages the world's most comprehensive suite of open molecular data resources. He also leads a research group working on inter-individual variation in humans and Medaka fish, as well as novel algorithmic methods for genomics.
Between 2020 and 2025, Ewan held key leadership roles at EMBL. He has been Director of EMBL-EBI since 2015 and was Associate Director from 2012 to 2015. Before that, he was the Head of Nucleotide Data at EMBL-EBI (2000-2015).
Ewan led the analysis of the Human Genome gene set, mouse and chicken genomes and the ENCODE project, focusing on non-coding elements of the human genome. His main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information, and use of images for chromatin structure.
A non-executive Director of Genomics England and the UK’s Health Data Research Service, Ewan is also a consultant and advisor to a number of companies, including Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Cantata Bio.
He was elected an EMBO member in 2012, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. Ewan was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2019. He was also elected as a member of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2024.
In 2019, Ewan became a Board Member of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). Ewan serves on a number of Scientific Advisory Boards, including for the Wellcome Genome Campus, DKFZ, the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), Institute Pasteur, Riken Institute, Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS), the Norwegian Centre for Molecular Biosciences and Medicine (NCMBM), and the Research Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) in Vienna.
He has received a number of 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.
Ewan completed his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute with Richard Durbin. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Tartu in Estonia and Birkbeck College at the University of London, UK.