Dr Eugene Koonin
Dr Euguene Koonin is to be awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) on Wednesday 2 July 2025 during the afternoon ceremony.
Dr Koonin is a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and a recognised expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology.
In 1978, Dr Koonin graduated with a Master of Science from the Department of Biology at Moscow State University. In 1983, he was awarded a PhD in molecular biology with his thesis, titled ‘Multienzyme organization of encephalomyocarditis virus replication complexes’ supervised by Vadim I Agol.
He has been working in the fields of computational biology and evolutionary genomics since 1984.
Dr Koonin moved to the US in 1991, first as a Visiting Scientist and, since 1996, as a Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), located in Bethesda, Maryland.
Dr Koonin’s group performs research in many areas of evolutionary genomics.
In 2011, Dr Koonin outlined his views on evolution in the book The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution. He has worked as adjunct professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Boston University and the University of Haifa.
Since 2014, Dr Koonin has served on the advisory editorial board of Trends in Genetics, and is co-Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Biology Direct. He served on the editorial board of Bioinformatics from 1999 until 2001. Dr Koonin is also an advisory board member in bioinformatics at Faculty of 1000.
In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In the same year the AI-powered research tool, Semantic Scholar, included Dr Koonin on its list of top ten most influential biomedical researchers.
In February 2022, he signed an open letter by Russian scientists condemning the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and renounced his membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences in protest.