Desmond G. Higgins

Desmond Gerard Higgins is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College Dublin,^{[9][12][13][14]} widely known for CLUSTAL,^[15] a series of computer programs for performing multiple sequence alignment. According to Nature, Higgins' papers describing CLUSTAL^[4][5] are among the top ten most highly cited scientific papers of all time.^[16][17][18]

Des Higgins
Des Higgins speaking at the ISMB conference in 2015.
Born	Desmond Gerard Higgins (1959-07-17) 17 July 1959 (age 66)[1]
Alma mater	Trinity College, Dublin (PhD)
Known for	CLUSTAL[2][3][4][5] T-Coffee[6]
Awards	ISCB Fellow (2015)[7] Benjamin Franklin Award (2018)[8] Lennart Philipson Award (2023)
Scientific career
Fields	Evolution Bioinformatics Sequence alignment Genomics[9]
Institutions	University College Dublin University College Cork[6]
Thesis	A numerical taxonomy of the Pterygote insects (1988)
Academic advisors	Paul M. Sharp[10][11]
Website	www.bioinf.ucd.ie www.ucd.ie/conway/research/researchers/conwayfellowsa-z/professordeshiggins

Education

Higgins was educated at Trinity College, Dublin^[19] where he was awarded a PhD in 1988 for research on numerical taxonomy of Pterygote insects.^[20]

Research

Research in the Higgins laboratory^[9] focuses 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 software was initially developed in the lab with by Cedric Notredame. Multivariate statistics are used to analyse microarray data sets and molecular evolution such as the evolution of promoters, introns and non-coding RNA.^[12][19]

Awards and honours

Higgins was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2015.^[7] He was awarded the Kimura Motoo Award in 2016 for his contributions to the advancement of evolutionary biology and molecular phylogeny.^[21] In 2018, Higgins received the Benjamin Franklin Award for open access in the life sciences.^[8] In March 2023, Higgins was awarded the Lennart Philipson Award in recognition of his major contributions towards enabling bioinformatics technologies based on multiple sequence alignment. ^[22]