Richard M. Durbin

Richard Durbin
Richard Durbin in his office at WTSI
Born	Richard Michael Durbin (1960-12-30) 30 December 1960 (age 56)
Nationality	British
Fields	Genomics Bioinformatics Human genetics Computational biology
Institutions	University of Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology Harvard University Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Highgate School King's College, Cambridge
Alma mater	University Cambridge (BA, PhD)
Thesis	Studies on the development and organisation of the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans (1987)
Doctoral advisor	John G. White
Doctoral students	Ewan Birney Ian Holmes
Other notable students	Sean Eddy Heng Li Alex Bateman (postdocs)
Known for	Biological Sequence Analysis
Notable awards	EMBO member (2009) Mullard Award (1994) FRS (2004)
Spouse	Julie Ahringer (m. 1996)
Website sanger.ac.uk/people/directory/durbin-richard

Richard Michael Durbin, FRS, born (1960-12-30) 30 December 1960 (age 56), is a British computational biologist, Senior Group Leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and an Honorary Professor of Computational Genomics at the University of Cambridge.

Durbin was educated at The Hall School Hampstead and Highgate School in London. After competing in the 1978/9 International Mathematical Olympiad, he went on to study at the University of Cambridge graduating in 1982 with a first class honours degree on the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. After graduating, he continued to study for a PhD at St John's College, Cambridge studying the development and organisation of the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans whilst working at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, supervised by John Graham White.

Durbin's early work included developing the primary instrument software for one of the first X-ray crystallography area detectors and the MRC Biorad confocal microscope, alongside contributions to neural modelling.