biology

Richard M. Durbin

Richard M. Durbin is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Richard M. Durbin rather than just read about it. In short: Richard Michael Durbin (born 1960) is a British computational biologist and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.

Key takeaways

Richard M. Durbin belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Richard M. Durbin to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Richard M. Durbin from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Richard Michael Durbin (born 1960) is a British computational biologist and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.

Education 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 second class honours degree in 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.

Career and research 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. He then led the informatics for the Caenorhabditis elegans genome project, 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. He has developed numerous methods for computational sequence analysis. These include gene finding (e.g. GeneWise) with Ewan Birney 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 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, the genome database Ensembl, and the gene family database TreeFam. More recently Durbin has returned to sequencing and has developed low coverage approaches to population genome sequencing, applied first to yeast, and has been one of the leaders in the application of new sequencing technology to study human genome variation. Durbin currently co-leads the international 1000 Genomes Project to characterise variation down to 1% allele frequency as a foundation for human genetics.

Awards and honours Durbin was a joint winner of the Mullard Award of the Royal Society in 1994 (for work on the confocal microscope), won the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Award of the Foundation for Science and Technology in 2004, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2004 and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2009. The Royal Society awarded its Gabor Medal to Durbin in 2017 for his contributions to computational biology. In 2023 he received the International Prize for Biology for his work on the Biology of Genomes.

Durbin's certificate of election for the Royal Society reads: Durbin is distinguished for his powerful contribution to computational biology. In particular, he played a leading role in establishing the new field of bioinformatics. This allows the handling of biological data on an unprecedented scale, enabling genomics to prosper. He led the analysis of the C. elegans genome, and with Thierry-Mieg developed the database software AceDB. In the international genome project he led the analysis of protein coding genes. He introduced key computational tools in software and data handling. His Pfam database allowed the identification of domains in new protein sequences; it used hidden Markov models to which approach generally he brought rigour and which led to covariance models for RNA sequence.

Personal life Durbin is the son of James Durbin and is married to Julie Ahringer, a scientist at the Gurdon Institute. They have two children.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Richard M. Durbin

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Richard M. Durbin claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Richard M. Durbin before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Richard M. Durbin ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Richard M. Durbin

In research: Richard M. Durbin appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Richard M. Durbin in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Richard M. Durbin is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1960 births, Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge, British bioinformaticians, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Richard M. Durbin outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Ask Teacher Smith questions about this articleOpens your AI tutor with a question about “Richard M. Durbin” →

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Richard M. Durbin in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Richard M. Durbin means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Richard M. Durbin out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Richard M. Durbin in simple terms?

Why does Richard M. Durbin matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Richard M. Durbin?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Richard M. Durbin.