Bruford was born to Ann and Colin Bruford in 1963. After graduating from St Cyres Comprehensive School in 1981, he pursued and earned a B.Sc. in biomolecular science from the University of Portsmouth in 1984. He then joined the University of Leicester for his PhD research under the supervision of Terry Burke on minisatellite markers in the genome of the domestic chicken. Bruford's PhD thesis, titled Hypervariable markers in the chicken genome, was submitted in 1992. In 1990, he joined the Zoological Society of London's conservation genetics group as a research associate, becoming its acting head in 1993 and finally its head in 1994. Bruford held the latter position until 1999, when he took on the position of a reader in the School of Biosciences at Cardiff University. Two years later, in 2001, he became a professor at Cardiff University. He became co-chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission′s Conservation Genetics Specialist Group in 2014. Initially a trustee, Bruford has been director of the Frozen Ark project since 2015; the same year he became co-director of the Sustainable Places Institute in Cardiff. In 2019 he became Dean for Environmental Sustainability at Cardiff University. Over his career, Bruford has also served as editor for several journals in conservation biology and genetics; from 2012 to 2016, he was editor-in-chief for Heredity. He has been part of the IUCN Conservation Breeding Specialist Group since 1993.
Research topics
Trained as a molecular biologist, Michael Bruford established links to behavioural ecology and conservation biology early on in his work. One of his first publications together with Terry Burke and Nick Davies seeks to link insights from bird genetics to their mating and breeding behaviour in dunnocks. Since the early 1990s, Bruford has made contributions to conservation biology by exploring population genetics of wild, captive and domestic animals. Recently, he has also sought to advance the field of biobanking of animal DNA, tissue and germlines for conservation purposes in the United Kingdom and beyond. Aside from his role as director of the Frozen Ark, a charity which seeks to support animal cryobanks and develop best practise procedures, Bruford is currently principal investigator in the BBSRC-funded project "CryoArks", which aims at establishing a national UK cryobank network. Michael Bruford has received a number of awards for his work. In 2003, he was awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London. The Learned Society of Wales elected him as a fellow in 2010. From 2012 to 2016, he held a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
Publications
Bruford is author of more than 300 scientific publications in journals and edited volumes. Together with Giorgio Bertorelle, Heidi Hauffe, Annapaolo Rizzoli and Cristiano Vernesi, he edited the handbook Population Genetics for Animal Conservation.
