Born on March 5, 1965, in London, England.
Edith Heard is a geneticist by training. She studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and completed her Ph.D. at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. Edith Heard arrived in France at the Pasteur Institute in 1990. She currently heads the Genetics and Developmental Biology Unit and the “Epigenesis and Mammalian Development” team at the Curie Institute.
She has received numerous awards for her research, including the CNRS Silver Medal in 2008, the Jean Hamburger Prize from the City of Paris in 2009, the ERC Advanced Investigator Award from the European Research Council in 2010, and the FRM Grand Prize in 2011. She has also been an elected member of the prestigious European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) since 2005. In 2012, she was appointed professor at the Collège de France. She also received the Inserm Grand Prize in 2017. From 2019 to 2025, Edith Heard served as director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, before taking over as director of the Francis Crick Institute in London in the summer of 2025.
For several years, Edith Heard has devoted herself to the study of epigenetic processes such as X-chromosome inactivation in mammals, a classic model in this field. Her work has contributed to the understanding of the initial events accompanying X-chromosome inactivation during embryogenesis. Her team has revealed remarkable dynamics in epigenetic changes during early development and has elucidated some of the mechanisms responsible for the X-inactivation process. She has also demonstrated the diversity of strategies employed in this process even among mammals that are very closely related in evolutionary terms. Her body of work is widely recognized in the field, as similar mechanisms appear to be involved in other epigenetic processes.
