{"id":68537,"date":"2024-06-14T10:38:32","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T08:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/?post_type=awards&#038;p=68537"},"modified":"2024-09-04T17:09:19","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T15:09:19","slug":"ewan-birney-royal-danish-academy","status":"publish","type":"awards","link":"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/awards-honours\/ewan-birney-royal-danish-academy","title":{"rendered":"Ewan Birney elected as a member of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>EMBL\u2019s Deputy Director General Ewan Birney has been elected as a corresponding member of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, in recognition of his contributions to bioinformatics and genomics.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.royalacademy.dk\/en\">Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters<\/a> was founded 280 years ago and is composed of roughly 500 elected members. The Academy works to actively strengthen the position of science and interdisciplinary understanding in Denmark.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBeing appointed as a corresponding member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters is a great honour, and I look forward to working with other members to help promote interdisciplinary research and discovery,\u201d said Birney.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Scientific career<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Ewan Birney is Deputy Director General of EMBL and Director of EMBL\u2019s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). He completed his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and in 2000, he became Head of Nucleotide Data at EMBL-EBI, rising through the EMBL ranks ever since. Birney led the analysis of the Human Genome gene set, as well as mouse and chicken genomes. He also led the ENCODE project, focusing on non-coding elements of the human genome. His main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information, and use of images for chromatin structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Danish collaborations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Ewan has a long-standing collaboration with Professor S\u00f8ren Brunak at the University of Copenhagen. In 2018, S\u00f8ren, Ewan and colleagues were awarded a <a href=\"https:\/\/datascience.novonordiskfonden.dk\/news\/novo-nordisk-foundation-awards-challenge-programme-grants-of-dkk-360-million-for-six-research-projects\/\">Novo Nordisk Foundation Challenge grant<\/a> for a project exploring how life-course data analytics can be used to understand diabetes disease initiation, progression and complications. More recently, they published a paper which describes <a href=\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/science-technology\/predict-cancer-risk\/\">a statistical model for predicting cancer risk on the basis of national health data<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>EMBL has extensive collaboration with Denmark and its scientific organisations. One prominent example is the <a href=\"https:\/\/dandrite.au.dk\/\">Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience (DANDRITE)<\/a>. It is a member of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/partnerships\/remote\/nordic\/\">Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine<\/a>, which aims to connect EMBL and Nordic research institutions focusing on diverse approaches to molecular medicine, including infection biology, genomics, and translational neuroscience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Read the full list of new members on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.royalacademy.dk\/da\/Aktuelt\/Nye-medlemmer-2024\">Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The honour recognises Birney&#8217;s contributions to bioinformatics and genomics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":68559,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","tags":[28,368,5758,36],"award-type":[17599],"award-unit":[17615],"award-site":[17613],"class_list":["post-68537","awards","type-awards","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-bioinformatics","tag-birney","tag-denmark","tag-embl-ebi","award-type-award","award-unit-bioinformatics","award-site-embl-ebi"],"acf":{"vf-news-ah-unit":[17615],"vf-news-ah-type":[17599],"vf-news-ah-site":[17613]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.2 - 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