Desmond Gerard Higgins is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

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 ...

University College Dublin University College Dublin (commonly referred to as UCD) ( ga, Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath) is a public research university in Dublin, Ireland, and a collegiate university, member institution of the National University of Ireland ...

, widely known for

CLUSTAL Clustal is a series of widely used computer programs used in bioinformatics for multiple sequence alignment. There have been many versions of Clustal over the development of the algorithm that are listed below. The analysis of each tool and its a ...

,, Broad Institute a series of computer programs for performing

multiple sequence alignment Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) may refer to the process or the result of sequence alignment of three or more biological sequences, generally protein, DNA, or RNA. In many cases, the input set of query sequences are assumed to have an evolutio ...

. According to ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

'', Higgins' papers describing CLUSTAL are among the top ten most highly cited

scientific papers : ''For a broader class of literature, see Academic publishing.'' Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within an academic field, scienti ...

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 Numerical taxonomy is a classification system in biological systematics which deals with the grouping by numerical methods of taxonomic units based on their character states. It aims to create a taxonomy using numeric algorithms like cluster anal ...

of Pterygote insects.

Research

Research in the Higgins laboratory focusses on developing new bioinformatics and statistical tools for

evolutionary biology Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life fo ...

. The

program for

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 Multivariate statistics is a subdivision of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one outcome variable. Multivariate statistics concerns understanding the different aims and background of each of the dif ...

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 Molecular evolution is the process of change in the sequence composition of cellular molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins across generations. The field of molecular evolution uses principles of evolutionary biology and population genetics ...

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 A non-coding RNA (ncRNA) is a functional RNA molecule that is not translated into a protein. The DNA sequence from which a functional non-coding RNA is transcribed is often called an RNA gene. Abundant and functionally important types of non-c ...

.Des Higgins

Awards and honours

Higgins was elected a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

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