Richard Michael Durbin (born 1960) is a British

computational biologist Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and d ...

and

Al-Kindi Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (; ; ; ) was an Arab Muslim polymath active as a philosopher, mathematician, physician, and music theorist Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understandin ...

Professor of

Genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinians, Augustinian ...

at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the

Wellcome Sanger Institute The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit organisation, non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust. It is l ...

where he was previously a senior group leader.Richard Durbin archive collection
Richard Durbin entry in the Wellcome Library archive.

Education

Durbin was educated at

The Hall School, Hampstead The Hall School is an independent boys' preparatory school in Belsize Park, Hampstead, north London, teaching boys aged 4 to 13. Description The school, across its three buildings, a new one being built currently, has a roll of over 432 boys ...

and

Highgate School Highgate School, formally Sir Roger Cholmeley's School at Highgate, is a co-educational, fee-charging, private day school, founded in 1565 in Highgate, London, England. It educates over 1,400 pupils in three sections – Highgate Pre-Preparato ...

in London. After competing in the 1978/9

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. It is widely regarded as the most prestigious mathematical competition in the wor ...

, he went on to study at the

graduating in 1982 with a second class honours degree in the

Cambridge Mathematical Tripos The Mathematical Tripos is the mathematics course that is taught in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Origin In its classical nineteenth-century form, the tripos was a distinctive written examination of undergraduate s ...

. After graduating, he continued to study for a PhD at

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College, formally the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch L ...

studying the development and organisation of the nervous system of ''

Caenorhabditis elegans ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' () is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a Hybrid word, blend of the Greek ''caeno-'' (recent), ''r ...

'' whilst working at the

Laboratory of Molecular Biology The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) is a research institute in Cambridge, England, involved in the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s. Since then it has remained a major medical r ...

(LMB) in Cambridge, supervised by John Graham White.

Career and research

Durbin's early work included developing the primary instrument software for one of the first

X-ray crystallography X-ray crystallography is the experimental science of determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to Diffraction, diffract in specific directions. By measuring th ...

area detectors and the MRC

Biorad Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. is an American developer and manufacturer of specialized technological products for the life science research and clinical diagnostics markets. The company was founded in 1952 in Berkeley, California, by husband and ...

confocal microscope, alongside contributions to neural modelling. He then led the informatics for the ''

'' genome project, and alongside Jean Thierry-Mieg developed the genome database AceDB, which evolved into the

WormBase WormBase is an online biological database about the biology and genome of the nematode model organism ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' and contains information about other related nematodes. WormBase is used by the ''C. elegans'' research community bo ...

web resource. Following this he played an important role in data collection for and interpretation of the human genome sequence. He has developed numerous methods for computational

sequence analysis In bioinformatics, sequence analysis is the process of subjecting a DNA, RNA or peptide sequence to any of a wide range of analytical methods to understand its features, function, structure, or evolution. It can be performed on the entire genome ...

. These include gene finding (e.g. GeneWise) with

Ewan Birney John Frederick William Birney (known as Ewan Birney) (born 6 December 1972) is Executive Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance ...

and

Hidden Markov models A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a Markov model in which the observations are dependent on a latent (or ''hidden'') Markov process (referred to as X). An HMM requires that there be an observable process Y whose outcomes depend on the outcomes of X ...

for protein and nucleic acid alignment and matching (e.g.

HMMER HMMER is a free and commonly used software package for sequence analysis written by Sean Eddy. Its general usage is to identify homologous protein or nucleotide sequences, and to perform sequence alignments. It detects homology by comparing ...

) with

Sean Eddy Sean Roberts Eddy is a professor of molecular and cellular biology and of applied mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics ...

and Graeme Mitchison. A standard textbook ''Biological Sequence analysis'' coauthored with

Anders Krogh Anders Krogh is a bioinformatician at the University of Copenhagen, where he leads the university's bioinformatics center. He is known for his pioneering work on the use of hidden Markov models in bioinformatics (together with David Haussler), an ...

and Graeme Mitchison describes some of this work. Using these methods Durbin worked with colleagues to build a series of important genomic data resources, including the protein family database

Pfam Pfam is a database of protein families that includes their annotations and multiple sequence alignments generated using hidden Markov models. The latest version of Pfam, 37.0, was released in June 2024 and contains 21,979 families. It is cur ...

, the genome database

Ensembl Ensembl genome database project is a scientific project at the European Bioinformatics Institute, which provides a centralized resource for geneticists, molecular biologists and other researchers studying the genomes of our own species and other v ...

, and the gene family database

TreeFam TreeFam (Tree families database) is a database of phylogenetic trees of animal genes. It aims at developing a curated resource that gives reliable information about ortholog and paralog assignments, and evolutionary history of various gene families ...

. More recently Durbin has returned to sequencing and has developed low coverage approaches to population genome sequencing, applied first to yeast, and has been one of the leaders in the application of new sequencing technology to study human genome variation. Durbin currently co-leads the international

1000 Genomes Project The 1000 Genomes Project (1KGP), taken place from January 2008 to 2015, was an international research effort to establish the most detailed catalogue of human genetic variation at the time. Scientists planned to sequence the genomes of at least o ...

to characterise variation down to 1% allele frequency as a foundation for human genetics.

Awards and honours

Durbin was a joint winner of the

Mullard Award The Mullard Award is awarded annually by the Royal Society to a person who has "an outstanding academic record in any field of natural science, engineering or technology and whose contribution is currently making or has the potential to make a co ...

of the Royal Society in 1994 (for work on the

confocal microscope Confocal microscopy, most frequently confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) or laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM), is an optical imaging technique for increasing optical resolution and contrast of a micrograph by means of using a sp ...

), won the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Award of the

Foundation for Science and Technology The Foundation for Science and Technology is a British charity, providing a neutral platform for debate of policy issues that have a science, technology or innovation element. Established in 1977, the Foundation brings together Parliamentar ...

in 2004, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2004 and a member of the

European Molecular Biology Organization The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) is a professional, non-profit organization of more than 2,100 life scientists. Its goal is to promote research in life science and enable international exchange between scientists. It co-funds cour ...

(EMBO) in 2009. The Royal Society awarded its

Gabor Medal The Gabor Medal is Awards, lectures and medals of the Royal Society, one of the medals awarded by the Royal Society for "acknowledged distinction of interdisciplinary work between the life sciences with other disciplines". The medal was creat ...

to Durbin in 2017 for his contributions to computational biology. In 2023 he received the

International Prize for Biology The is an annual award for "outstanding contribution to the advancement of research in fundamental biology." The Prize, although it is not always awarded to a biologist, is one of the most prestigious honours a natural scientist can receive. Ther ...

for his work on the Biology of Genomes. Durbin's certificate of election for the Royal Society reads:

Personal life

Durbin is the son of James Durbin and is married to Julie Ahringer, a scientist at the

Gurdon Institute The Gurdon Institute is a research facility at the University of Cambridge, specialising in developmental biology and cancer biology. History The Institute was founded in 1989 to provide a rich, collaborative environment for scientists working i ...

. They have two children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Durbin, Richard Living people Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology 1960 births Wellcome Trust People educated at Highgate School Members of the European Molecular Biology Organization British bioinformaticians Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge People educated at The Hall School, Hampstead Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society International Mathematical Olympiad participants Human Genome Project scientists