Julie Ahringer

Julie Ahringer is a Senior Group Leader at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge. Research in her laboratory is focused on cell polarity and functions of chromatin remodelling complexes in development, using C. elegans as a model system. To facilitate these and other studies, her lab constructed and screened a genome-wide RNA interference (RNAi) library, which allows the inactivation of most C. elegans genes simply by feeding bacteria to worms. This was the first systematic inactivation of most of the genes in an animal. Dr. Ahringer obtained her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1991 from the University of Wisconsin, and then carried out post-doctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. She was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2003, to the British Academy of Medical Sciences in 2007, and was awarded the Royal Society’s Francis Crick lecture prize in 2004.