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Picture: 2005 Overton Prize Winner, Ewan Birney
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2005 Overton Prize Winner - Ewan Birney
Dr. Ewan Birney of the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), was awarded the 2005 Overton Prize in honor of his advocacy of open source bioinformatics, and his generous contributions to the BioPerl community. Perhaps even more important to biology is his leadership of the Ensembl genome annotation project, providing rapid and accurate computational annotations for eukaryotic genomes.
"Dr. Birney follows his own advice, and credits the success of the Ensembl project to the open source development model," said Dr. Lawrence Hunter of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, the ISCB's founder and former chair of the ISCB Awards Committee. Hunter added, "Dr. Birney is not only a hugely productive scientist, but he started young: his first bioinformatics tools, Pairwise and Searchwise, were published when he was an undergraduate at Oxford, and their successor, GeneWise, is still in broad use more than a decade after its introduction."
The prize was awarded at the ISCB's annual meeting, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), in Detroit, Michigan, on June 29, where Dr. Birney then delivered the annual Overton keynote lecture on the final day of the conference.
For additional information on Dr. Birney’s many contributions to bioinformatics, please read the ISCB newsletter article at www.iscb.org/images/stories/newsletter/newsletter8-2/birney.html.
