The 24th Sackler Distinguished Lecture is being given by Edith Heard, Professor of the Collège de France and Director of the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology Unit at the Institut Curie in Paris. Her research focuses on the epigenetics behind X chromosome inactivation and her talk will be on ‘Exploring epigenetic regulation and gene dosage effects in development and disease at the level of the X chromosome’.

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 in London, working on gene amplification mechanisms in cancer. She moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1990, as a post doc and then as a CNRS scientist, which is where she began her studies on the epigenetic process of X-chromosome inactivation. After a year at Cold Spring Harbor she established her lab at the Curie Institute in 2001. She is currently director of the Genetics and Developmental Biology Department at the Institut Curie. 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, Professor of Collège de France in 2012 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013. She has won several prizes, most recently in 2017 she was awarded the Grand Prix of INSERM and the European Society of Human Genetics award.