Birney was educated at Eton College as an Oppidan Scholar where he studied GCE Advanced Levels in Maths, Biology, Chemistry and Art [REF].
Birney completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry at Balliol College, Oxford in 1996[REF][REF][REF] followed by a PhD at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, supervised by Richard Durbin[REF] as postgraduate student of St John's College, Cambridge [REF].