Prof. Dr. Patrick Heun is a newly elected member of the GfG Advisory Board. He heads the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Technical University of Darmstadt. His research group is interested in the organization, establishment and maintenance of specialized chromatin states in the genome, using Drosophila and human tissue culture cells as model organisms. He is particularly interested in centromeres, which mediate the connection of chromosomes to the mitotic spindle to ensure the even distribution of chromosomes to daughter cells. The epigenetic inheritance of centromere identity over many cell generations is of key importance and can lead to genome instability and diseases if disrupted.
Patrick Heun's teaching focuses on molecular genetics, epigenetics and cell biology. Patrick Heun studied biology at the JWG University in Frankfurt and obtained his doctorate at the University of Lausanne. In 2001, he was a postdoc at the Salk Institute and later at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs in the USA. From 2005 he became Junior Group Leader at the MPI for Epigenetics and Immunobiology in Freiburg and in 2014 Senior Lecturer at the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh, from 2022 as Full Professor. Since 2023 he has been Professor of Molecular Genetics at TU Darmstadt.
