Rate My Professor Richard Durbin

Richard Durbin is the Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a research group in the Department of Genetics, and serves as an Associate Faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. A computational biologist, he earned a BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1982, followed by a Fulbright fellowship in biophysics at Harvard University and a PhD from the University of Cambridge at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1987 on the development and organization of the C. elegans nervous system. He conducted postdoctoral research in neural networks at Stanford University before joining the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a staff member and junior group leader, contributing to the C. elegans genome project. At the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, he advanced through roles including Senior Group Leader, Head of Informatics, Deputy Director, Joint Head of Human Genetics, and Acting Head of Computational Genomics.

Durbin's research centers on evolutionary and computational genomics, encompassing genetic variation, population genetics in humans and cichlid fishes, and algorithms for high-throughput sequencing and genome assembly. He authored key software tools such as the BWA read aligner and vg for variation graphs. He led landmark initiatives including the 1000 Genomes Project, UK10K project, and gorilla reference genome sequencing, and contributed to hidden Markov model methods for sequence analysis as well as genomic databases like WormBase, Pfam, TreeFam, and Ensembl. Prominent publications include "Biological sequence analysis: probabilistic models of proteins and nucleic acids" (1998, with Sean R. Eddy, Anders Krogh, and Graeme Mitchison) and "Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows–Wheeler transform" (2009). His contributions have shaped bioinformatics and large-scale genomics. Durbin is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), recipient of the Royal Society Gabor Medal (2017), the 39th International Prize for Biology (2023), and the Genetics Society Medal (2026).