DNA: Professor Ewan Birney

DNA

A short tour of one of the key molecules of life, the histories of family trees it contains and a surprising way to store data with DNA.

Ewan Birney is a Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute and a Senior Scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. He played a vital role in annotating the genome sequences of human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms; this work has had a profound impact on our understanding of genomic biology. Ewan also led the analysis group for the ENCODE project, which is defining functional elements in the human genome. His current areas of research include functional genomics, assembly algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information and compression of sequence information.