Julian Gough (scientist)

Julian John Thurstan Gough (born 1974)^[2] was a Group Leader in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) of the Medical Research Council (MRC).^[3][7][8] He was previously^[when?] a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Bristol.^[9]

Julian Gough
Born	Julian John Thurstan Gough[1] September 1974 (age 50)[2]
Education	The Perse School
Alma mater	University of Bristol (BSc) University of Cambridge (PhD)
Known for	Superfamily database
Scientific career
Fields	Bioinformatics Computational Biology Molecular Biology Genomics[3]
Institutions	University of Bristol RIKEN Stanford University Tokyo Medical and Dental University Pasteur Institute Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) GeneTrainer Ltd.[2][4] Mogrify Ltd.[2] OutSee Ltd.[2]
Thesis	Hidden Markov models and their application to the genome analysis in the context of protein structure (2001)
Doctoral advisor	Cyrus Chothia[5][6]
Website	outsee.co.uk

Education

Gough was educated at The Perse School^[10] in Cambridge and the University of Bristol where he was awarded a joint honours degree in Mathematics and Physics in 1998.^[9][10] He went on to complete his PhD in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) supervised by Cyrus Chothia on genome analysis and protein structure as a postgraduate student of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating in 2001.^[6]

Career and research

Following his PhD, Gough completed postdoctoral research at the LMB and Stanford University, with Michael Levitt. Subsequently, he was a scientist at RIKEN in Tokyo, a Professor member of faculty in the Computer Science department at the University of Bristol, where he worked from 2007-2017, and then a programme leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge until 2023.^[10] He has also been a visiting scientist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and an associate professor at Tokyo Medical and Dental University.^[9] Gough is currently CEO and founder of OutSee Limited,^[11][12] an AI genomics company in Cambridge, winner of the Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Awards 2025 "Start-up of the Year".^[13]

Gough's research interests are in bioinformatics, computational biology, molecular biology, genomics^[3] which has led to the creation of the Superfamily database^[14][15] of Hidden Markov models (HMMs) representing all proteins of known structure. His research has been published in leading peer reviewed scientific journals including Nature,^[16][17] Science,^[18][19] Cell,^[20] Nucleic Acids Research,^{[21][22][23][24][25]} PNAS,^[26][27] the Biochemical Journal,^[28] the Journal of Molecular Biology,^[29][30][31] Genome Research,^[32] Bioinformatics,^[33] PLOS Genetics,^[34] Nature Genetics^[35] and the Journal of Bacteriology.^[36]

Gough's research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC),^[37] the European Union (EU) Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and the Royal Society of London.^[9]