Richard Michael Durbin FRS[17] (born 1960)[15] is a British computational biologist[18][19][2] and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.

[3] Durbin's early work included developing the primary instrument software for one of the first X-ray crystallography area detectors[30] and the MRC Biorad confocal microscope, alongside contributions to neural modelling.

[35][36] These include gene finding (e.g. GeneWise) with Ewan Birney[37] and Hidden Markov models for protein and nucleic acid alignment and matching (e.g. HMMER) with Sean Eddy and Graeme Mitchison.

A standard textbook Biological Sequence analysis coauthored with Sean Eddy, Anders Krogh and Graeme Mitchison[16] describes some of this work.

Durbin was a joint winner of the Mullard Award of the Royal Society in 1994 (for work on the confocal microscope), won the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Award of the Foundation for Science and Technology in 2004, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2004[17] and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2009.