Edith Heard

Edith Heard, PhD, FRS is a British scientist. She graduated from Cambridge University in 1986, specialising in genetics, and then carried out her PhD at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, working on gene amplification mechanisms in cancer. Edith moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1990, as a postdoc, which is where she began her studies on the epigenetic process of X-chromosome inactivation. In 2000 she spent a year at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the USA as a visiting scientist, before moving to the Institut Curie in 2001, where she was director of the Genetics and Developmental Biology Department. In 2025, Edith joined the Francis Crick Institute as their Chief Executive Officer. Edith's laboratory focuses on epigenetic processes in mammals, with a particular interest in chromosome biology 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.