Created in 1954, the CNRS Gold Medal is one of France's most prestigious scientific awards. This year, it honors biologist Edith Heard, a professor at the Collège de France, for her outstanding contributions to the advancement of epigenetics research. Edith Heard was appointed Chair of Epigenetics and Cellular Memory at the Collège de France in 2012.
She will be awarded the CNRS Gold Medal on December 12, 2024 at a ceremony in Paris.
Born in London in 1965, Edith Heard studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, before taking an interest in epigenetics during her thesis on gene amplification in cancer at the Imperial Cancer Research Foundation (ICRF) in London. She arrived in France in 1990 on a scholarship from the Human Frontier Science Program and joined the Institut Pasteur for a post-doctorate, where she began her work on chromosome inactivation X, which was to be the guiding light of her career. In 2010, she became director of " Genetics and developmental biology ", a joint research unit between CNRS, Inserm and Institut Curie. In 2012, she was appointed Professor at the Collège de France. Since 2019, Edith Heard has headed the prestigious European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an intergovernmental research organization involving 29 countries, and was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2022. Edith Heard also sits on several scientific boards, including the WHO Scientific Council.
After Françoise Combes in 2020, Jean Dalibard in 2021, Jean-Marie Tarascon in 2022, Edith Heard is the fourth Collège de France professor to receive this prestigious distinction in recent years.
