Speakers

Edith Heard is a British scientist working at the Institut Curie in Paris and Professor of Epigenetics and Cellular Memory at the Collège de France. She graduated from Cambridge University in 1986, specializing in genetics, and then carried out her PhD at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund working on gene amplification mechanisms in cancer. She moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1990, as a post doc, which is where she began her studies on the epigenetic process of X-chromosome inactivation. Following a year at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the USA she moved backed to France to join the Institut Curie in 2001 as a group leader, where she is currently director of the Genetics and Developmental Biology Department. Her laboratory focuses on epigenetic processes in mammals, with a particular interest in epigenetics and the role of non-coding RNAs, chromatin structure and nuclear organization, in the establishment and maintenance of differential expression patterns during development and in disease. She became an EMBO member in 2005, was awarded the CNRS Silver medal in 2008 and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013.