C.V. Prof. Wolf Reik

Head, Laboratory of Developmental Genetics and Imprinting, The Babraham Institute, Cambridge

Professor of Epigenetics, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience University of Cambridge.

Professor Reik is internationally distinguished for his fundamental discoveries of epigenetic mechanisms in mammalian development, physiology, genome reprogramming, and human diseases. His outstanding work led to the discovery of the molecular mechanism of genomic imprinting, and uncovered non-coding RNA and chromatin looping regulating imprinted genes, which he showed to be involved in fetal nutrition, growth, and disease. He discovered epigenetic reprogramming, including active demethylation, and showed that it affects pluripotency and lineage commitment of embryonic stem cells. He found that the environment influences epigenetic programming in embryos, with changes in gene expression persisting in adults and their offspring.

Wolf's team investigates the way additional information can be added to DNA sequence in the genome through a process called epigenetics. This information, encoded by a range of processes, including chemical modification of DNA bases or alteration of proteins that bind to DNA, can be altered during the life of an organism.

Wolf is interested in the processes of epigenetic reprogramming during early embryo development that allow germline cells to be directed to become adult cells in mammalian animals. As a member of Associate Faculty he is collaborating with Sanger Institute scientists to discover the biology and pathology of epigenetic reprogramming. As part of this research, he is working to develop new sequencing approaches that will capture the range of DNA modifications that are present.

Wolf is based at the neighbouring Babraham Institute where he is Head of the Epigenetics Programme; he is also honorary Professor of Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge. He obtained his MD from the University of Hamburg, and carried out postdoctoral work in Cambridge, before becoming a Fellow of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine and subsequently Head of Programme at the Babraham Institute.

He and his collaborators discovered epigenetic reprogramming in mammalian development, and are elucidating the mechanisms of demethylation of DNA and the biological significance of reprogramming in normal development, stem cell function, and in disease.

He was awarded the Wellcome Prize in Physiology and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a Member of EMBO and the Academia Europaea.