Desmond Gerard Higgins is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College Dublin ,[ 3] [ 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[ 10] [ 11] are among the top ten most highly cited scientific papers of all time.[ 16] [ 17] [ 18]
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[ 3] 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.[ 1] 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.[ 2] 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]
References
^ a b "ISCB Fellows" . International Society for Computational Biology. Archived from the original on 15 April 2015.
^ a b "Benjamin Franklin Award - Bioinformatics.org" . www.bioinformatics.org . Retrieved 16 March 2018 .
^ a b c Desmond G. Higgins publications indexed by Google Scholar
^ a b Notredame, C. D.; Higgins, D. G.; Heringa, J. (2000). "T-coffee: A novel method for fast and accurate multiple sequence alignment". Journal of Molecular Biology . 302 (1): 205– 17. doi :10.1006/jmbi.2000.4042 . PMID 10964570 . S2CID 10189971 .
^ "Des Higgins, PhD: Computational Biology Tree" . academictree.org . Archived from the original on 14 July 2017.
^ Sharp, Paul M.; Cowe, Elizabeth; Higgins, Desmond G. ; Shields, Denis C.; Wolfe, Kenneth H. ; Wright, Frank (1988). "Codon usage patterns in Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Drosophila melanogaster and Homo sapiens; a review of the considerable within-species diversity" . Nucleic Acids Research . 16 (17): 8207– 8211. doi :10.1093/nar/16.17.8207 . ISSN 0305-1048 . PMC 338553 . PMID 3138659 .
^ Des Higgins at Library of Congress
^ Higgins, Desmond G.; Sharp, Paul M. (1988). "CLUSTAL: a package for performing multiple sequence alignment on a microcomputer". Gene . 73 (1): 237– 244. doi :10.1016/0378-1119(88)90330-7 . PMID 3243435 .
^ Higgins, Desmond G.; Sharp, Paul M. (1989). "Fast and sensitive multiple sequence alignments on a microcomputer". Bioinformatics . 5 (2): 151– 153. doi :10.1093/bioinformatics/5.2.151 . PMID 2720464 .
^ a b Thompson, J. D.; Gibson, T. J.; Plewniak, F.; Jeanmougin, F.; Higgins, D. G. (1997). "The CLUSTAL_X windows interface: Flexible strategies for multiple sequence alignment aided by quality analysis tools" . Nucleic Acids Research . 25 (24): 4876– 4882. doi :10.1093/nar/25.24.4876 . PMC 147148 . PMID 9396791 .
^ a b Thompson, J. D.; Higgins, D. G.; Gibson, T. J. (1994). "CLUSTAL W: Improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice" . Nucleic Acids Research . 22 (22): 4673– 4680. doi :10.1093/nar/22.22.4673 . PMC 308517 . PMID 7984417 .
^ a b "Professor Desmond Gerard Higgins B.A.(Mod), PhD" . Dublin: University College Dubin. Archived from the original on 5 April 2015.
^ "Des Higgins laboratory" . University College Dublin. Archived from the original on 14 December 2014.
^ Desmond G. Higgins publications from Europe PubMed Central
^ Des Higgins: Visualizing Multiple Sequence Alignments on YouTube , Broad Institute
^ Van Noorden, R.; Maher, B.; Nuzzo, R. (2014). "The top 100 papers: Nature explores the most-cited research of all time" . Nature . 514 (7524): 550– 3. doi :10.1038/514550a . PMID 25355343 .
^ Gorey, Colm (2014). "Irish professor Des Higgins in top 10 most cited papers of all time" . Dublin: siliconrepublic.com. Archived from the original on 5 June 2015.
^ Desmond G. Higgins publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
^ a b Des Higgins ORCID 0000-0002-3952-3285
^ Higgins, Des (1981). A numerical taxonomy of Pterygote insects (PhD thesis). Trinity College, Dublin. OCLC 842505334 . ProQuest 301410442 .
^ "Prof Des Higgins to Receive Kimura Motoo Award" . UCD School of Medicine . Retrieved 31 May 2021 .
^ "EMBL Alumni Awards Announced for 2023" . EMBL Alumni Awards . 29 March 2023. Retrieved 31 March 2023 .
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