Ewan Birney, EMBL-EBI Director. Credit: Carrie Tang

Five things about genetics everyone should know

Thu 14 March 2019

Babbage Lecture Theatre

From human disease and intellectual ability, ethnicity and race to sex and our origins, Dr Ewan Birney and colleagues, discuss the five things that everyone should know about genetics.

Part of Cambridge Science Festival

Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith is the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics and Head of the Department of Genetics. Her research focuses on the molecular events governing pre- and post-natal mammalian development.

Dr Matthew Hurles leads a research group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute focused on deciphering the genetic causes of severe developmental disorders, and understanding how DNA mutates as it is passed from generation to generation.

Dr Stuart Ritchie is a Lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. His research focuses on the genetic and environmental links to human intelligence differences.

Ewan Birney is Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute with Dr Rolf Apweiler, and runs a small research group. He is also EMBL-EBI's Joint Head of Research, alongside Dr Nick Goldman.

Ewan completed his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute with Richard Durbin. In 2000, he became Head of Nucleotide data at EMBL-EBI and in 2012 he took on the role of Associate Director at the institute. He became Director of EMBL-EBI in 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. Ewan’s main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information (in particular information associated with individual differences in humans and Medaka fish) and use of images for chromatin structure.

Ewan is a non-executive Director of Genomics England, and a consultant and advisor to a number of companies, including Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Dovetail Genomics and GSK. Ewan 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. He was also made a CBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list in 2018.

Ewan 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.

Cost: Free