Edith Heard

Edith Heard studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, graduating in genetics, and then carried out her PhD at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (London), working on gene amplification in cancer. During her post doc at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, she began her work on the epigenetic process of X-chromosome inactivation. Since 2001, she has led the Mammalian Developmental Epigenetics team at the InstitutCurie and was director of the Unit of Genetics and Developmental Biology Department from 2010 -2019. She became Director General of EMBL in 2019.

She has been awarded several prizes and honours, including the L’Oreal - UNESCO prize for Women in Science in 2020, the INSERM Grand Prix, the Jean Hamburger Prize (Ville de Paris) as well as the Grand Prix de la FRM. She was elected as EMBO member in 2005 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013. In 2012, she was appointed Professor of the Collège de France. She has been awarded two ERC Advanced Investigator Awards in 2010 and 2015.

Edith Heard has made many important contributions to the emerging field of epigenetics through her work on one of its most classic examples, X-chromosome inactivation. This process entails the silencing of one of the two X chromosomes during early development in female mammals, enabling dosage compensation between the sexes. This phenomenon of chromosome-wide gene silencing that can be stably propagated during cell division, was discovered more than half a century ago and represents a paradigm for epigenetics. The pioneering work of Edith Heard, using X inactivation as a model system, has shed light on epigenetic mechanisms at multiple timescales: over the cell cycle, during development, across generations and in evolution. Her team revealed the dynamics of this epigenetic process during development – being established early on, then rapidly reversed in a subset of cells that give rise to the embryo-proper. This finding had important general implications for the plasticity of epigenetic states in the embryo, in stem cells and during induced pluripotency. It also had implications in cancer, where dedifferentiation is commonly found and epigenetic plasticity seems to be a hallmark. Edith Heard and her colleagues were also the first to discover the evolutionary diversity of events underlying X inactivation, with striking differences in the timing and manner in which this process is set up between even closely related mammals during early embryogenesis. They have also defined some of the first changes in the chromatin status of the X chromosome which can be considered as potential epigenetic marks ensuring the cellular memory of the inactive state. Her group have also made several discoveries on the molecular mechanisms of X inactivation including their most recent work on the key epigenetic factors involved in gene silencing. Finally the Heard lab have made seminal discoveries on the importance of chromosomal organization during X inactivation, which led them to the co-discovery of the existence of topologically associating domains (TADs), a new level of chromatin structure which could have implications for gene regulation and genome function.