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Andrew Rambaut

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Andrew Rambaut
Alma materUniversity of Edinburgh (BSc)
University of Oxford (DPhil)
AwardsRoyal Society University Research Fellowship
Scientific career
FieldsMolecular evolution
Virology
Molecular epidemiology
Computational biology[1]
InstitutionsUniversity of Edinburgh
ThesisThe inference of evolutionary and population dynamic processes from molecular phylogenies (1997)
Doctoral advisorPaul H. Harvey[2]
Websitetree.bio.ed.ac.uk/people/arambaut/ Edit this at Wikidata

Andrew Rambaut FRS FRSE is a British evolutionary biologist, as of 2020 Professor of molecular evolution at the University of Edinburgh.[1][3]

Education

Rambaut earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Edinburgh in 1993 followed by a DPhil in Zoology from the University of Oxford in 1997 supervised by Paul H. Harvey.[2][4][5]

Career and research

He was based at Oxford until 2006, when he took up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship position and became Chair of Molecular Evolution at Edinburgh in 2010.[6]

Rambaut's research is primarily on the "evolutionary and epidemiological study of viral pathogens of humans and animals".[6]

In 2007, he published a paper with Alexei Drummond describing BEAST (Bayesian evolutionary analysis sampling trees), a software package for evolutionary analysis by molecular sequence variation, which uses Bayesian inference techniques.[7][8] This is freely available on GitHub.[9] A year later, Rambaut set up Virological, an online "discussion forum for molecular evolution and epidemiology of viruses".[10]

COVID-19

Science reported on 11 January 2020 that Rambaut was the first to publish the genome of the COVID-19 coronavirus after it was sent to him by Edward C. Holmes.[11][12] Holmes has said that it "took 52 minutes from receiving the code [from his Chinese colleague Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang] to publishing" on Virological.[13][14] The BBC Horizon episode The Vaccine stated: "When Chinese scientists published the genetic sequence of a mystery new virus on January 10th 2020, vaccine scientists around the world immediately sprang into action".[15]

Rambaut was one of the authors of the scientific paper The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,[16] which concluded that "SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus".

Awards and honours

Rambaut was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2022,[17] having been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) since 2014.

Rambaut is an attendee of the UK's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).[18]

References

  1. ^ a b Andrew Rambaut publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  2. ^ a b "Paul Harvey: Evolution tree". academictree.org.
  3. ^ Andrew Rambaut publications from Europe PubMed Central
  4. ^ "Andrew Rambaut". ed.ac.uk.
  5. ^ Rambaut, Andrew (1997). The inference of evolutionary and population dynamic processes from molecular phylogenies. ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 556744675. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.339299.
  6. ^ a b "Professor Andrew Rambaut FRSE". Royal Society of Edinburgh. Retrieved 25 April 2020.
  7. ^ Alexei Drummond; Andrew Rambaut (8 November 2007). "BEAST: Bayesian evolutionary analysis by sampling trees". BMC Evolutionary Biology. 7 (1): 214. doi:10.1186/1471-2148-7-214. ISSN 1471-2148. PMC 2247476. PMID 17996036. Wikidata Q27860723.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
  8. ^ "BEAST: Bayesian Evolutionary Analysis Sampling Trees". BEAST Software. 13 October 2020. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  9. ^ "beast-dev/beast-mcmc". GitHub. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  10. ^ Virological.org on the Wayback Machine, 2 April 2016
  11. ^ “Novel 2019 coronavirus genome”, 10 January 2020. https://virological.org/t/novel-2019-coronavirus-genome/319
  12. ^ Cohen, Jon (2020). "Chinese researchers reveal draft genome of virus implicated in Wuhan pneumonia outbreak". Science.
  13. ^ Kate Aubusson (2020) "Virus rebel Professor Edward Holmes named NSW Scientist of the Year", 26 October 2020, Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/virus-rebel-professor-edward-holmes-named-nsw-scientist-of-the-year-20201026-p568qj.html
  14. ^ David Quammen (2020) "The Sobbing Pangolin", 31 August 2020, New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/31/did-pangolins-start-the-coronavirus-pandemic
  15. ^ Horizon Special: The Vaccine, 10 June 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09kw2jz
  16. ^ Kristian G Andersen; Andrew Rambaut; W Ian Lipkin; Edward C. Holmes; Robert F Garry (1 April 2020). "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2". Nature Medicine. 26 (4): 450–452. doi:10.1038/S41591-020-0820-9. ISSN 1078-8956. PMC 7095063. PMID 32284615. Wikidata Q87830056.
  17. ^ Anon (2022). "Professor Andrew Rambaut FRS". royalsociety.org. London: Royal Society.
  18. ^ Sample, Ian (24 April 2020). "Who's who on secret scientific group advising UK government?". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 April 2020.