Ewan Birney is the Interim Executive Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). In this role, he jointly leads EMBL’s activities and advances the vision and priorities of the ‘Molecules to Ecosystems’ programme. Previously, Ewan was Director of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) between 2015 and 2025. In 2020, he also became the Deputy Director General of EMBL. Ewan has led key projects including the analysis of the Human Genome gene set and the ENCODE project. His current research focuses on functional genomics, DNA algorithms, and statistical methods for genomic data analysis.