Ewan Birney is Director of EMBL-EBI with Dr Rolf Apweiler, and runs a small research group. He played a vital role in annotating the genome sequences of human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms; this work has had a profound impact on our understanding of genomic biology. He led the analysis group for the ENCODE project, which is defining functional elements in the human genome. Ewan’s main areas of research include functional genomics, assembly algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information (in particular information associated with individual differences) and compression of sequence information. Ewan completed his PhD at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute with Richard Durbin, and worked in the laboratories of leading scientists Adrian Krainer, Toby Gibson and Iain Campbell. He has received a number of prestigious 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 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. Ewan is a non-executive Director of Genomics England, and is a consultant and advisor to a number of companies, including Oxford Nanopore Technologies and GSK. DNA sequence remains at the heart of molecular biology and bioinformatics. Dr Birney is Director of EMBL-EBI and has a modest research group, focused on sequence algorithms and using intra-species variation to explore elements of basic biology. The Birney group has a long-standing interest in developing sequencing algorithms. Over the past four years a considerable focus has been on compression, with theoretical and now practical implementations of compression techniques. "Blue skies" research includes collaborating with Dr Nick Goldman on a method to store digital data in DNA molecules. The group continues to be involved in this area as new opportunities arise - including the application of new sequencing technologies. We are also interested in the interplay of natural DNA sequence variation with cellular assays and basic biology. Over the past five years there has been a tremendous increase in the use of genome-wide association to study human diseases. However, this approach is very general and need not be restricted to the human disease arena. Association analysis can be applied to nearly any measureable phenotype in a cellular or organismal system where an accessible, outbred population is available. We are pursuing association analysis for a number of both molecular (e.g. RNA expression levels and chromatin levels) and basic biology traits in a number of species where favourable populations are available including human, and Drosophila. In the future we hope to expand this to a variety of other basic biological phenotypes in other species, including establishing the first vertebrate near-isogenic wild panel in Japanese Rice Paddy fish (Medaka, Oryzias latipes). Future plans The Birney Research group will continue to work on sequence algorithms and intra species variation. In humans there will be work on molecular phenotypes in an iPSC panel generated as part of the HipSci consortium. In Drosophila we will look at multi-time point developmental biology measures; and we will assess the near isogenic panel in Japanese Rice Paddy fish.