Bio:

Eileen Furlong is head of the Genome Biology department and Senior Scientist at EMBL. She studied biochemistry at University College Dublin, Ireland, where she obtained her Ph.D. and then transitioned to developmental biology during her postdoc at Stanford University, US. She became a group leader at EMBL in Heidelberg in October 2002, and is head of the Genome Biology Department at EMBL since 2009. She is a recipient of two ERC advanced grants, elected member of EMBO, the Academia Europaea, Leopoldina and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), UK. Eileen is known for her work in uncovering different mechanisms of genome regulation, including understanding how developmental enhancers function and are organised in the three-dimensional nucleus. Her research has pioneered genomic methods for use in developing embryos, which uncovered many new insights into how transcriptional networks give rise to diverse cell types.