Marianne Rots obtained her PhD at the VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam the Netherlands in 2000 and was subsequently trained as postdoctoral fellow at the Gene Therapy Center of the University of Alabama, Birmingham, USA. In 2001, she was recruited to the School of Pharmacy in Groningen, and in 2007 to the University Medical Center Groningen, where she combined gene therapy with epigenetics and pioneered Epigenetic Editing. In 2010, she was appointed professor of Molecular Epigenetics in the Department of Pathology and Medical Biology at the University Medical Center in Groningen. The Rots team was one of the first world-wide to use epigenetic editing to re-express epigenetically silenced genes (Chen et al, NAR 2014) and to demonstrate sustained re-expression of such genes (Cano-Rodriguez et al, Nat Comm 2016). She co-edited a Methods in Molecular Biology issue on Epigenome Editing, is vice-chair in a EU COST action (CM1406: www.epichembio.eu) and serves as co-Editor in Chief of Nature Springer’s Clinical Epigenetics (https://clinicalepigeneticsjournal.biomedcentral.com/).