Richard Michael Durbin FRS^[17] (born 1960)^[1] is a British computational biologist^[18][19][4] and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.^{[20][21][22][23]} He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.^{[24][25][26][27]}

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Richard Durbin FRS
Durbin in 2008
Born	Richard Michael Durbin (1960-12-30) 30 December 1960 (age 63)[1]
Nationality	British
Education	Highgate School
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA, PhD)
Known for	Biological Sequence Analysis[2]
Spouse	Julie Ahringer ​ (m. 1996)​ [1]
Awards	Mullard Award (1994) EMBO Member (2009)[3] Gabor Medal (2017)
Scientific career
Fields	Genomics Bioinformatics Human genetics Computational biology Genome evolution[4]
Institutions	University of Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology Stanford University Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute King's College, Cambridge
Thesis	Studies on the development and organisation of the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans (1987)
Doctoral advisor	John G. White[5]
Doctoral students	Ewan Birney[6]
Other notable students	Sean Eddy[7][8] Heng Li[9][10][11][12] Alex Bateman[13][14][15][16] (postdocs)
Website	www.gen.cam.ac.uk/directory/richard-durbin

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Durbin was educated at The Hall School, Hampstead^{[citation needed]} and Highgate School in London.^[1] After competing in the 1978/9 International Mathematical Olympiad,^[28] he went on to study at the University of Cambridge graduating in 1982^[29] with a second class honours degree in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. After graduating, he continued to study for a PhD^[5] at St John's College, Cambridge^[1] 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.^[5]

Durbin's early work included developing the primary instrument software for one of the first X-ray crystallography area detectors^[30] and the MRC Biorad confocal microscope, alongside contributions to neural modelling.^[31][32]

He then led the informatics for the Caenorhabditis elegans genome project,^[33] and alongside Jean Thierry-Mieg developed the genome database AceDB, which evolved into the WormBase web resource. Following this he played an important role in data collection for and interpretation of the human genome sequence.^[34]

He has developed numerous methods for computational sequence analysis.^[35][36] These include gene finding (e.g. GeneWise) with Ewan Birney^[37] and Hidden Markov models for protein and nucleic acid alignment and matching (e.g. HMMER) with Sean Eddy and Graeme Mitchison. A standard textbook Biological Sequence analysis coauthored with Sean Eddy, Anders Krogh and Graeme Mitchison^[2] 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,^[38] the genome database Ensembl,^[39] and the gene family database TreeFam.^[11]

More recently Durbin has returned to sequencing and has developed low coverage approaches to population genome sequencing, applied first to yeast,^[40][41] and has been one of the leaders in the application of new sequencing technology to study human genome variation.^[42][43] Durbin currently co-leads the international 1000 Genomes Project to characterise variation down to 1% allele frequency as a foundation for human genetics.

Durbin is the son of James Durbin and is married to Julie Ahringer, a scientist at the Gurdon Institute. They have two children.^[1]