Richard Durbin

Richard Durbin has been one of the leading scientists in bioinformatics since the 1990s. His early contributions were in critical modern biological instrumentation, X-ray crystallographic detectors and confocal microscopy. He led the computational analysis of the C. elegans genome, with Thierry-Mieg developed ACeDB, one of the first genome databases, used in the human and other genome projects, and initiated the Pfam protein domain database. He subsequently developed innovative methods based on hidden Markov models, and efficient data structures for sequence matching and genome assembly. More recently, he led the 1000 Genomes Project, an international effort that used short read DNA sequencing to create the first deep catalog of human genomic variation.  He continues to work in computational and evolutionary genomics, with a current interest in the use of new long read single molecule DNA sequencing methods to assemble reference genomes for species across the diversity of life.