Geoff Barton (scientist)

Geoffrey ''Goeff'' John Barton (born 1 November 1960) is a computational biologist and Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Dundee, Scotland, UK where he is Head of the Division of Computational Biology in the School of Life Sciences.^[1][2] He is known for his research in computational biology, particularly in the analysis of protein sequences and structures, and for the development of widely used bioinformatics software Jalview. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy.

Geoff Barton FRSE, FRSB
Barton outside the Discovery Centre, University of Dundee, July 2025
Born	Geoffrey John Barton (1960-11-01) 1 November 1960 (age 64) Glenelg, South Australia
Citizenship	United Kingdom/Australia
Education	University of Manchester Birkbeck, University of London
Known for	Sequence alignment software, Protein structure prediction, Jalview, JPred
Awards	Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology
Scientific career
Fields	Bioinformatics Multiple Sequence Alignment Protein structure prediction Genetics Transcriptomics Machine learning
Institutions	University of Dundee European Bioinformatics Institute University of Oxford Imperial Cancer Research Fund
Thesis	Computer analysis of protein sequence and structure (1987)
Doctoral advisor	Michael Sternberg
Website	www.compbio.dundee.ac.uk

Education

Barton was educated at Challney High School and Luton Sixth Form College.^{[citation needed]} In 1980 he attended the University of Manchester where he passed the first year of a BSc Honours in Mechanical Engineering before completing a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry (1984).^{[citation needed]} His final year research project "A Computer programme to aid DNA Sequencing and sequence analysis" tackled the assembly problem for Sanger sequencing on hand read gels.^{[citation needed]} His doctoral thesis in protein structure prediction was supervised by Michael Sternberg at Birkbeck, University of London.^[3]

Career

After his Ph.D., Barton was awarded an Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) Research Fellowship to continue research on protein structure prediction in the Biomedical Computing Unit at the ICRF Laboratories in London.^[4] He was then awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 1989 to establish his group at the University of Oxford where in 1995 he became head of Genome Informatics at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics.^[4] Barton moved in 1997 to be a Research Team Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute Cambridge and Head of the Protein Data Bank in Europe^[4] before relocating to the University of Dundee in 2001 as Professor of Bioinformatics in the School of Life Sciences. He was initially co-director of the Post-Genomics and Molecular Interactions Centre before becoming Founding Head of the Interdisciplinary Research Division of Computational Biology in 2013.^[1]

Research

Barton's research is focused on the development and application of computational tools for the analysis of protein sequences and their three-dimensional structures in the context of evolution to infer structure and function. His work focuses on understanding how DNA changes impact proteins' three-dimensional structure, function, and role in disease.^[5][6][7] He developed methods for protein multiple sequence alignment,^[8] and was an early advocate of benchmarks to assess the accuracy and biological relevance of sequence alignment methods through comparison with alignments based on three-dimensional structures.^[8][9][10] He has also published benchmarks for RNA-seq^[11][12][13] and protein ligand binding site prediction.^[14]

His group has developed widely cited software tools and techniques:^[4] Alscript (multiple sequence alignment formatting),^[15] Jalview (data integration and visualisation workbench on multiple sequence alignments),^[16][17][18] JPred (protein secondary structure prediction),^[19][20] STAMP (alignment of multiple protein three-dimensional structures),^[21] and JABAWS (remote execution of software).^[22]

Barton established the High Performance Computing facility at the University of Dundee in 2001 and the Division of Computational Biology.^[1]

Other Interests

Barton has released original instrumental music on several streaming platforms.^[23][24] He is also an amateur meteorologist and has maintained the Dundee West End Weather Station since 2002.^[25] He was interviewed about the link between bioinformatics and weather forecasting by weather presenter Judith Ralston for the BBC Landward TV show^[26] and Stephen Jardine on BBC Radio Scotland.^[27]

Awards and honors

• Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), elected 2019^[28]
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB), elected 2011^[29]