Julian Gough (scientist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Julian John Thurstan Gough (born 1974)[2] was a Group Leader in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) of the Medical Research Council (MRC).[3][7][8] He was previously[when?] a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Bristol.[9]
- University of Bristol (BSc)
- University of Cambridge (PhD)
Julian Gough | |
|---|---|
| Born | Julian John Thurstan Gough[1] September 1974 (age 51)[2] |
| Education | The Perse School |
| Alma mater |
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| Known for | Superfamily database |
| Relatives | Douglas Gough (father) Charles Thurstan Shaw (grandfather) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions |
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| Thesis | Hidden Markov models and their application to the genome analysis in the context of protein structure (2001) |
| Cyrus Chothia[5][6] | |
| Website | outsee |
Education
Gough was educated at The Perse School[10] in Cambridge and the University of Bristol where he was awarded a joint honours degree in Mathematics and Physics in 1998.[9][10] He went on to complete his PhD in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) supervised by Cyrus Chothia on genome analysis and protein structure as a postgraduate student of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating in 2001.[6]
Career and research
Following his PhD, Gough completed postdoctoral research at the LMB and Stanford University, with Michael Levitt. Subsequently, he was a scientist at RIKEN in Tokyo, a Professor member of faculty in the Computer Science department at the University of Bristol, where he worked from 2007-2017, and then a programme leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge until 2023.[10] He has also been a visiting scientist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and an associate professor at Tokyo Medical and Dental University.[9] Gough is currently CEO and founder of OutSee Limited,[11][12] an AI genomics company in Cambridge, winner of the Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Awards 2025 "Start-up of the Year".[13]
Gough's research interests are in bioinformatics, computational biology, molecular biology, genomics[3] which has led to the creation of the Superfamily database[14][15] of Hidden Markov models (HMMs) representing all proteins of known structure. His research has been published in leading peer reviewed scientific journals including Nature,[16][17] Science,[18][19] Cell,[20] Nucleic Acids Research,[21][22][23][24][25] PNAS,[26][27] the Biochemical Journal,[28] the Journal of Molecular Biology,[29][30][31] Genome Research,[32] Bioinformatics,[33] PLOS Genetics,[34] Nature Genetics[35] and the Journal of Bacteriology.[36]
Gough's research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC),[37] the European Union (EU) Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and the Royal Society of London.[9]
