Desmond Gerard Higgins is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

University College Dublin University College Dublin (), commonly referred to as UCD, is a public research university in Dublin, Ireland, and a collegiate university, member institution of the National University of Ireland. With 38,417 students, it is Ireland's largest ...

, widely known for

CLUSTAL Clustal is a computer program used for multiple sequence alignment in bioinformatics. The software and its algorithms have gone through several iterations, with ClustalΩ (Omega) being the latest version . It is available as standalone software, ...

,, Broad Institute a series of computer programs for performing

multiple sequence alignment Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is the process or the result of sequence alignment of three or more biological sequences, generally protein, DNA, or RNA. These alignments are used to infer evolutionary relationships via phylogenetic analysis an ...

. According to ''

Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...

'', Higgins' papers describing CLUSTAL are among the top ten most highly cited

scientific papers Scientific literature encompasses a vast body of academic papers that spans various disciplines within the Natural science, natural and social sciences. It primarily consists of academic papers that present original empirical research an ...

of all time.

Education

Higgins was educated at

Trinity College, Dublin Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Univ ...

where he was awarded a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1988 for research on

numerical taxonomy Numerical taxonomy is a classification system in biological systematics which deals with the grouping by numerical methods of taxonomic units based on their character states. It aims to create a taxonomy using numeric algorithms like cluster an ...

of Pterygote insects.

Research

Research in the Higgins laboratory focuses on developing new bioinformatics and statistical tools for

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biolo ...

. The

program for

has been developed in the Higgins lab and the

T-Coffee T-Coffee (Tree-based Consistency Objective Function for Alignment Evaluation) is a multiple sequence alignment software using a progressive approach. It generates a library of pairwise alignments to guide the multiple sequence alignment. It can al ...

software was initially developed in the lab with by Cedric Notredame.

Multivariate statistics Multivariate statistics is a subdivision of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one outcome variable, i.e., '' multivariate random variables''. Multivariate statistics concerns understanding the differ ...

are used to analyse

microarray A microarray is a multiplex (assay), multiplex lab-on-a-chip. Its purpose is to simultaneously detect the expression of thousands of biological interactions. It is a two-dimensional array on a Substrate (materials science), solid substrate—usu ...

data sets and

molecular evolution Molecular evolution describes how Heredity, inherited DNA and/or RNA change over evolutionary time, and the consequences of this for proteins and other components of Cell (biology), cells and organisms. Molecular evolution is the basis of phylogen ...

such as the evolution of promoters,

intron An intron is any nucleotide sequence within a gene that is not expressed or operative in the final RNA product. The word ''intron'' is derived from the term ''intragenic region'', i.e., a region inside a gene."The notion of the cistron .e., gen ...

s and

non-coding RNA A non-coding RNA (ncRNA) is a functional RNA molecule that is not Translation (genetics), translated into a protein. The DNA sequence from which a functional non-coding RNA is transcribed is often called an RNA gene. Abundant and functionally imp ...

.Des Higgins

Awards and honours

Higgins was elected a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2015. He was awarded the Kimura Motoo Award in 2016 for his contributions to the advancement of evolutionary biology and molecular phylogeny. In 2018, Higgins received the Benjamin Franklin Award for open access in the life sciences. In March 2023, Higgins was awarded the Lennart Philipson Award in recognition of his major contributions towards enabling bioinformatics technologies based on multiple sequence alignment.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Higgins, Desmond Gerard Irish bioinformaticians Living people Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology 1959 births Academics of University College Dublin 20th-century Irish mathematicians 21st-century Irish mathematicians 20th-century Irish biologists 21st-century Irish biologists