Edith Heard is Director General of the EMBL. She studied Natural Sciences specialising in Genetics at Cambridge University and then obtained her PhD from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. After a postdoc at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, she set up her group in 2001 at the Institut Curie where she became Director of the Genetics and Developmental Biology Unit in 2010. She was appointed as Professor of the Collège de France in 2012 to the Chair of Epigenetics and Cellular Memory, and in 2019 she became Director General of EMBL. Edith’s laboratory studies epigenetics, focusing on the process of X-chromosome inactivation (XCI) whereby one of the two X chromosomes is silenced during female development. Her group has revealed the remarkable dynamics of epigenetic processes in development and disease. This has been recognised by many prizes, most recently the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Award.