Fergal has been working on the Ensembl project since 2012. He leads eukaryotic genome annotation efforts at EMBL-EBI as part of the Ensembl project and has strategic oversight on the Ensembl Genebuild, Ensembl Compara and Ensembl Havana teams. Over the course of his career he has been heavily involved in scaling genome annotation from tens to now thousands of species in Ensembl. He is particularly interested in biodiversity, where he leads annotation efforts for Darwin Tree of Life, the European Genome Reference Atlas and other biodiversity consortia, pangenomics, where he leads annotation efforts for the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium, and human/mouse reference annotation as part of the GENCODE project. Fergal holds a BSc in computational biology and bioinformatics and a PhD in comparative genomics and evolutionary biology from Maynooth University, Ireland.