Desmond G. Higgins

Des Higgins

Des Higgins speaking at the ISMB conference in 2015.
Born Desmond Gerard Higgins
Fields
Institutions
Alma mater Trinity College, Dublin (BA, PhD)
Thesis A numerical taxonomy of the Pterygote insects (1988)
Known for
Notable awards Fellow of the ICSB (2015)[7]

Website

Desmond Gerard Higgins is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College Dublin,[1][8][9][10] widely known for CLUSTAL,[11] a series of computer programs for performing multiple sequence alignment. According to Nature, Higgins papers describing CLUSTAL[5][6] are among the top ten most highly cited scientific papers of all time.[12][13]

Education

Higgins was educated at Trinity College, Dublin[14] where he was awarded a PhD in 1988 for research on numerical taxonomy of Pterygote insects.[15]

Research

Research in the Higgins laboratory focusses 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.[8][14]

Awards and honours

Higgins was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ICSB) in 2015.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 Desmond G. Higgins's publications indexed by Google Scholar
  2. 1 2 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.
  3. ↑ 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.
  4. ↑ 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.
  5. 1 2 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 147148Freely accessible. PMID 9396791.
  6. 1 2 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 308517Freely accessible. PMID 7984417.
  7. 1 2 "ISCB Fellows". International Society for Computational Biology. Archived from the original on 2015-04-15.
  8. 1 2 "Professor Desmond Gerard Higgins B.A.(Mod), PhD.". Dublin: University College Dubin. Archived from the original on 2015-04-05.
  9. ↑ "Des Higgins laboratory". University College Dublin. Archived from the original on 2014-12-14.
  10. ↑ Desmond G. Higgins publications from Europe PubMed Central
  11. ↑ Des Higgins: Visualizing Multiple Sequence Alignments on YouTube, Broad Institute
  12. ↑ Van Noorden, R.; Maher, B.; Nuzzo, R. (2014). "The top 100 papers: Nature explores the most-cited research of all time". Nature. London. 514 (7524): 550. doi:10.1038/514550a. PMID 25355343.
  13. ↑ Colm Gorey (2014). "Irish professor Des Higgins in top 10 most cited papers of all time". Dublin: siliconrepublic.com. Archived from the original on 2015-06-05.
  14. 1 2 Des Higgins Entry at ORCID
  15. ↑ Higgins, Des (1981). A numerical taxonomy of Pterygote insects (PhD thesis). Trinity College, Dublin. OCLC 842505334.
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