About the speaker
Prof Ewan Birney is the Executive Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), working alongside Interim Director General Peer Bork to lead EMBL’s ‘Molecules to Ecosystems’ programme.
A distinguished bioinformatician, Ewan also runs a small research group focused on intraspecies variation in humans and medaka fish.
He earned his PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute under Richard Durbin, later becoming Head of Nucleotide Data at EMBL-EBI (2000), Associate Director (2012), and Director (2015–2025). In 2020, he was appointed Deputy Director General of EMBL and became its Executive Director in 2025.
Prof Birney 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. His main areas of research include functional genomics, DNA algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information and the use of images for chromatin structure.
Prof Birney is a non-executive Director of Genomics England and advisor to companies like Oxford Nanopore and Cantata Bio. Ewan is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Academy of Medical Sciences, an EMBO member, and a recipient of awards, including the Francis Crick Award and Overton Prize. In 2019, he was appointed CBE and joined the BBSRC Board. In 2024, he was elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Abstract
This lecture consists of two projects: one on AI modeling of healthcare trajectories and another on Scandinavian and UK history through genetics. The first project leverages generative AI techniques, specifically attention-based transformers, to model healthcare data from the UK BioBank and validate it with Danish data.
Our model predicts all diseases (ICD10 codes) and accurately samples future health trajectories. The second project uses identical by descent (IBD) analysis to trace genetic links between individuals from Denmark and the UK, revealing population movements from 500AD to 1100AD. With over 13 billion comparisons across 800,000 individuals, we verified the IBD map’s accuracy against Danish pedigrees.
The historical insights gained from IBD sharing between Denmark, the UK, and the broader Scandinavian region will be highlighted.
About the seminar series
NCMBM invites guest speakers from the local environment as well as from research centres in Norway to present on topics within molecular life science and medicine.
The seminar is open to all, with no registration needed.