Andrew Rambaut

Andrew Rambaut FRSE is a British evolutionary biologist, as of 2020 Professor of Molecular Evolution at the University of Edinburgh.

Rambaut earned a BSc in Zoology from the University of Edinburgh (1993) and a DPhil in Zoology from the University of Oxford (1997).[1]

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.[2] He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2014.

Rambaut's research is primarily on the "evolutionary and epidemiological study of viral pathogens of humans and animals".[2]

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.[3][4] This is freely available on GitHub.[5] A year later, Rambaut set up Virological, an online "discussion forum for molecular evolution and epidemiology of viruses".[6]

COVID-19 research

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.[7][8] Holmes has said that it "took 52 minutes from receiving the code [from his Chinese colleague Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang] to publishing" on Virological.[9][10] 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".[11]

Rambaut was one of the authors of the scientific paper "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", which concluded that "SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus".[12]

He is an attendee of the UK's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).[13]

References
  1. "Andrew Rambaut".
  2. "Professor Andrew Rambaut FRSE". Royal Society of Edinburgh. Retrieved 25 April 2020.
  3. AJ Drummond and A Rambaut (2007) “BEAST: Bayesian evolutionary analysis sampling trees”, BMC Evolutionary Biology 7 vol. no 1, pages 1-8
  4. "BEAST: Bayesian Evolutionary Analysis Sampling Trees". BEAST Software. 13 October 2020. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  5. "beast-dev/beast-mcmc". GitHub. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  6. Virological on the Wayback Machine, 2 April 2016
  7. “Novel 2019 coronavirus genome”, 10 January 2020. https://virological.org/t/novel-2019-coronavirus-genome/319
  8. Jon Cohen (2020) “Chinese researchers reveal draft genome of virus implicated in Wuhan pneumonia outbreak”, Science, January. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/chinese-researchers-reveal-draft-genome-virus-implicated-wuhan-pneumonia-outbreak
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. Horizon Special: The Vaccine, 10 June 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09kw2jz
  12. Andersen, Kristian G.; Rambaut, Andrew; Lipkin, W. Ian; Holmes, Edward C.; Garry, Robert F. (17 March 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.
  13. Sample, Ian (24 April 2020). "Who's who on secret scientific group advising UK government?". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 April 2020.
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