Ewan Birney

Ewan Birney is the Executive Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). Together with Peer Bork, who is the Interim Director General of EMBL, Ewan leads EMBL’s activities, continuing to deliver on the vision and priorities set out in the ‘Molecules to Ecosystems’ programme.

Ewan also runs a small research group working on intraspecies variation in medaka fish and humans.

Ewan completed his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute with Richard Durbin. In 2000, he became Head of Nucleotide data at EMBL-EBI and in 2012 he took on the role of Associate Director at the institute. He was Director of EMBL-EBI between 2015 and 2025. In 2020, Ewan also became the Deputy Director General of EMBL, and in 2025, he was named Executive Director of EMBL. 

Ewan led the analysis of the Human Genome gene set, mouse and chicken genomes and the ENCODE project, focusing on non-coding elements of the human genome. Ewan’s main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information (in particular information associated with individual differences in humans and Medaka fish) and use of images for chromatin structure.

Ewan is a non-executive Director of Genomics England, and a consultant and advisor to a number of companies, including Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Cantata Bio. Ewan was elected an EMBO member in 2012, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. Ewan was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours. He was also elected as a member of The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2024.

In 2019, Ewan became a Board Member of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). Ewan serves on a number of Scientific Advisory Boards (SABs), including the DKFZ, ICR, OICR, Institute Pasteur and Riken institute.

He has received a number of awards including the 2003 Francis Crick Award from the Royal Society, the 2005 Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award for contributions in Open Source Bioinformatics. Ewan holds honorary doctorates from the University of Tartu in Estonia and Birkbeck College at the University of London, UK.