Genetics Society Medal 2026 – Prof Richard Durbin

The Genetics Society is delighted to announce Prof Richard Durbin, the University of Cambridge, as the winner of the 2026 Genetics Society Medal.

Richard Durbin started out as a mathematician, with a BA in Mathematics from Cambridge (1982), then switched to biology via a one-year Fulbright Award in the USA and carried out his PhD research on C. elegans neural development at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge under John White. After a short postdoc on neural modelling, he came back to Cambridge in 1990 to join John Sulston and colleagues at the start of the genome sequencing project. He was a founder member of the Sanger Centre, holding various roles there as it developed into the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and both developing and applying a variety of computational tools and approaches for genome assembly and analysis. After completion of the C. elegans and (initial) human genomes, and helping establish Pfam and Ensembl, he was an early proponent of population genome sequencing to study genetic diversity genome-wide at the sequence level. In particular, he co-led the 1000 Genomes Project to provide a foundation reference for human sequence diversity, along the way leading the development of tools still widely used for studying sequence variation (including bwa, BAM files, VCF format).

In 2017, Richard moved to the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, where he and his group have worked on speciation in the Lake Malawi cichlid fish radiation, ancient DNA studies, statistical genetics methods for demographic inference, and pangenome and genome assembly methods. Recently, he has been involved in efforts to extend reference genome sequencing across the diversity of life and has come to appreciate how important mobile elements are in genome evolution and potentially species evolution, making these a new focus for his research.

Richard was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004, a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2009, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. He received the Gabor Medal of the Royal Society in 2017 and the International Prize for Biology in 2023.