Desmond G. Higgins

Desmond Gerard Higgins is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College Dublin, widely known for CLUSTAL, a series of computer programs for performing multiple sequence alignment. According to Nature, Higgins papers describing CLUSTAL are among the top ten most highly cited scientific papers of all time.

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

Research in the Higgins laboratory focusses on developing new bioinformatics and statistical tools for evolutionary biology. The CLUSTALprogram 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.

Higgins was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2015. In 2018, Higgins received the Benjamin Franklin Award for open access in the life sciences.