Desmond Gerard Higgins is a Professor of

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

at University College Dublin, widely known for CLUSTAL,, Broad Institute a series of computer programs for performing multiple sequence alignment. According to '' Nature'', Higgins' papers describing CLUSTAL are among the top ten most highly cited scientific papers of all time.

Education

Higgins was educated at

Trinity College, Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

where he was awarded a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in 1988 for research on numerical taxonomy of Pterygote insects.

Research

Research in the Higgins laboratory focusses on developing new bioinformatics and statistical tools for evolutionary biology. The CLUSTAL program for multiple sequence alignment has been developed in the Higgins lab and the

T-Coffee T-Coffee (Tree-based Consistency Objective Function for Alignment Evaluation) is a multiple sequence alignment software using a progressive approach. It generates a library of pairwise alignments to guide the multiple sequence alignment. It can al ...

software was initially developed in the lab with by Cedric Notredame. Multivariate statistics are used to analyse

microarray A microarray is a multiplex lab-on-a-chip. Its purpose is to simultaneously detect the expression of thousands of genes from a sample (e.g. from a tissue). It is a two-dimensional array on a solid substrate—usually a glass slide or silicon t ...

data sets and molecular evolution such as the evolution of promoters,

intron An intron is any nucleotide sequence within a gene that is not expressed or operative in the final RNA product. The word ''intron'' is derived from the term ''intragenic region'', i.e. a region inside a gene."The notion of the cistron .e., gene. ...

s and non-coding RNA.Des Higgins

Awards and honours

Higgins was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2015. He was awarded the Kimura Motoo Award in 2016 for his contributions to the advancement of evolutionary biology and molecular phylogeny. In 2018, Higgins received the Benjamin Franklin Award for open access in the life sciences.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Higgins, Desmond Gerard Irish bioinformaticians Living people Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology 1959 births Academics of University College Dublin