2026 VAI Epigenetics Symposium

Alejandro Aguilera obtained a bachelor’s degree in biology (2015) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, performing his thesis research focusing on transdifferentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells into neurons. After, he moved to Israel where he obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at the Weizmann Institute of Science, working in the laboratory of Prof. Jacob Hanna. Since March 2024, Alejandro has established his own lab at HHMI Janelia Research Campus, USA, where he has been focusing on engineering new systems for ex utero culture of natural and “synthetic” mouse embryos, harnessing these platforms for investigating the mechanisms regulating early mouse embryogenesis.

Ana Bošković studied Molecular Biology at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Strasbourg and the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) in France in 2014. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, USA, as a Human Frontier Science Program Fellow. Since 2021, she has been a group leader at EMBL Rome, Italy.

The Boskovic Lab studies mechanisms governing transgenerational epigenetic inheritance and transcriptional activation of the genome of early embryos. Ana’s work discovered that sperm-borne tRNA fragments responsive to paternal diet can influence the activation of totipotency-associated genes through regulation of histone protein levels and chromatin organization. Since joining EMBL, the lab has been developing a multi-exposome paradigm setting for systematic molecular dissection of the impact of human-relevant environments of reproductive fitness and immediate offspring phenotypes. The lab continues to work on tRNA-fragments, particularly focusing on elucidating if and how early transcriptomic changes in the embryo ultimately contribute to adult metabolic phenotypes.

Ana is a recipient of EMBL HETT and NIH RO1 grants, and a member of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology as well as Junior Investigators in Chromatin and Epigenetics.

Dr. Sarah Bowling is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her laboratory focuses on understanding the mechanisms governing resilience in mammalian embryogenesis (i.e., determining how embryos withstand and recover from diverse genetic and environmental perturbations). Sarah carried out her Ph.D. at Imperial College London, where her work focused on understanding the mechanisms and roles of cell competition during early mammalian development. For her postdoctoral research at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, she co-developed new lineage tracing mouse models that enable the simultaneous tracing of millions of cells in vivo with unique, transcribed cellular barcodes. Her laboratory uses a combination of classical embryological approaches combined with next-generation tools to understand resilience during embryogenesis.

Justin Crocker is a group leader at EMBL Heidelberg whose research bridges synthetic biology, developmental genetics and genomics. He leads a multidisciplinary program investigating how gene regulatory networks and epigenetic states shape phenotypic diversity and evolvability. His lab develops high-throughput mutagenesis technologies, quantitative imaging, and genomic mapping tools to probe the architecture, specificity and adaptability of regulatory systems.

Crocker earned his Ph.D. from Dartmouth College and completed postdoctoral training at Princeton and Janelia/HHMI before joining EMBL. His broader program integrates theory, machine learning, and experimental evolution to connect molecular mechanisms to organismal function across scales — including recent work uncovering how chemical exposures reshape regulatory activity, animal behavior and physiology.

Dr. Gehring began her scientific career at Williams College, earned her doctorate from University of California Berkeley with Robert Fischer in 2005, and continued her studies as a postdoctoral researcher with Steven Henikoff at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Gehring established her lab at Whitehead Institute and the Department of Biology at MIT in 2010. Among other honors, she received the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award from the Genetics Society of America and the Gruber Foundation in 2013. In 2023, Gehring was named the inaugural David Baltimore Chair in Biomedical Research. In 2024, she was selected as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance and gene regulation in plants, primarily Arabidopsis, with a focus on the activity and modulation of these processes during reproduction and seed development.

Yogesh Goyal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. Yogesh is also an investigator at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Yogesh has a multidisciplinary background with his undergraduate in engineering at IIT Gandhinagar, graduate research in quantitative developmental biology at Princeton University, and postdoctoral training in single-cell biology at the University of Pennsylvania. The Goyal Lab is a curiosity-driven laboratory working on a range of biological problems, developing novel experimental, computational, and theoretical frameworks to monitor, perturb, model, and ultimately control single-cell variabilities and emergent fate choices in development and disease. Yogesh’s work has been recognized by Pew-Stewart Scholars Award, Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship, Cancer Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, STAT Wunderkinds, Forbeck Scholar, and Schmidt Science Fellowship.

Jamie Hackett is a Group Leader and Deputy Head at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) site in Rome (Italy), and co-founder/CSO of Epitome Therapeutics. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge, UK, under Prof. Azim Surani. The Hackett Lab investigates the fundamental principles of epigenetic regulation, from molecular mechanisms to organismal responses. They integrate environmental perturbations and (epi)genome editing technologies to dissect the mechanisms by which normal or aberrant chromatin states functionally participate in genome control and disease programming. They further use multi-omics readouts and synthetic (epi)genetics to build models of how specific molecular changes lead to phenotypic responses over time and generations.

Nicola studied biology in Naples, Italy, where he got an M.Sc. in Biology in 2002 under the supervision of Prof. Roberto Di Lauro. He then worked three years in industry in the Merck research laboratories in the laboratory of Riccardo Cortese in Pomezia, Rome, before going back to basic research.

He performed his Ph.D. under the guidance of Ulrike Gaul at Rockefeller University in NYC, where he graduated in 2008, working on microRNAs and their role in the germline in Drosophila.

He went on as an EMBO and HFSP fellow postdoc in the lab of Giacomo Cavalli at the IGH in Montpellier, France, in September 2009, studying Polycomb epigenetic regulation in the germline.

In July 2014, he started his laboratory as a junior group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg in the “Chromatin Regulation” department.
His laboratory demonstrated that parents transmit not just genetic but also epigenetic information to progeny in the form of histone post-translational modifications. This discovery revealed an entirely unanticipated role for germline-inherited histone modification in mediating gene regulation in the next generation early embryo. Environmentally induced chromatin changes in parents can be transmitted through the germline, and his work suggests that histone modifications could carry this epigenetic information.

Since January 2018, he has been an EMBO young investigator. In 2019, he was awarded an ERC consolidator grant. In 2024, Nicola became Director at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg leading the department of Developmental Epigenetics.

Dr. Adelheid (Heidi) Lempradl studies how metabolism shapes early development and how parental nutrition can influence the lifelong health of their children. Her discoveries aim to guide new approaches for preventing disease and improving health across generations.

Dr. J. Andrew Pospisilik seeks to understand how we become whom we become, and how our disease susceptibility is defined from early on in life, even before conception, with the long-term goal of being able to predict individual lifelong health outlooks at birth.

Dr. Ramalho-Santos was born in New Haven, CT, in 1972 and went back to Portugal with his family when he was four months old. He grew up in Coimbra, Portugal. He received a B.S. in Biology and a Master’s in Cell Biology at the University of Coimbra, where he worked on the biochemistry of plant proteases under the supervision of Carlos Faro. He moved to the U.S. in 1997 for a Ph.D. in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Harvard University, where he was co-advised by Doug Melton and Andy McMahon. In his doctoral studies, he did pioneering work in stem cell transcriptomics and cell signaling in mouse development. In 2003, he moved to San Francisco to become a UCSF Faculty Fellow, an independent research position designed as an alternative to a traditional postdoc. In 2007, he became an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Ob/Gyn and Pathology at UCSF, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. He is the recipient of a 2008 NIH New Innovator Award and a 2016 Royan International Research Award in Reproductive Genetics. In 2018, he moved to Canada to become the Canada 150 Research Chair in Developmental Epigenetics, Senior Investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and Full Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto. In 2025, he became the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Molecular Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital.

His lab has made important contributions to our understanding of the regulation of early embryonic development, gene expression in stem cells, hypertranscription, cellular dormancy, developmental role of transposons and environment-epigenome interactions during development. More information about his research can be found here: https://www.mrsantoslab.org

Ollie Rando has a broad background in genomics, chromatin, and epigenetics, having trained with Tom Maniatis at Harvard as an undergraduate and with Jerry Crabtree during his M.D./Ph.D. at Stanford, before becoming an independent Genome Fellow at the Bauer Center for Genomic Research in 2002. Since 2007, he is Professor of Biochemistry at UMass Medical School.

His research program includes two broad areas. In the first, his lab develops genomic assays for nucleosome positioning, histone modification, histone dynamics, and chromosome folding. They combine these assays with mutant analyses to uncover the role of chromatin structure in regulation of the genome, and to investigate the mechanistic basis for copying of chromatin states. In the second area of interest, the Rando Lab studies intergenerational transfer of environmental information from one generation to the next, focusing on paternal effects of diet and other perturbations in mammals. Their efforts in this system have lead them to intensively investigate the sperm epigenome, to develop expertise in reproductive tract biology and preimplantation development, and to explore tRNA modifications and functional roles for tRNA fragments in various biological systems.

Dr. Russell Rockne began his education with a dual bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Fine Art at the University of Colorado at Boulder, followed by a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington in 2013, and then a postdoctoral fellowship in Mathematical Oncology at Northwestern University. He joined City of Hope in 2015 as an Assistant Professor and is the founding Director of the Division of Mathematical Oncology and Computational Systems Biology within the Department of Computational and Quantitative Medicine.

Dr. Rockne’s interdisciplinary career spans many roles, including research in neurological surgery, pathology, and applied mathematics. In 2014, he was honored with the “Future of Mathematical Biology” award by the Society for Mathematical Biology. His research focuses on leveraging mathematical modeling to advance basic, translational, and clinical science, with applications across multiple diseases and therapeutic modalities, including immunotherapy, targeted therapies, and precision oncology.

Hiroyuki Sasaki is a University Professor and Emeritus Professor at Kyushu University, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at RIKEN, Japan. He is a geneticist and epigeneticist internationally recognized for his contributions to elucidating the epigenetic regulation of mouse gametogenesis, genomic imprinting, and embryogenesis. He also studies human disorders caused by defects in epigenetic regulation. Sasaki graduated from Kyushu University Medical School in 1982 and received his Ph.D. in Medical Science in 1987. He served as an Overseas Research Fellow at the AFRC Institute and the Wellcome/CRC Institute in Cambridge, UK, from 1990 to 1993. He was appointed Professor at the National Institute of Genetics in 1998 and later Professor at the Medical Institute of Bioregulation, Kyushu University, in 2010. He has held several leadership positions, including Dean of the Medical Institute of Bioregulation, Vice President of Kyushu University, and Dean of the Institute for Advanced Study, Kyushu University. He received the prestigious Purple Ribbon Medal in 2015. In 2025, he identified the X-linked genetic variation responsible for the orange coat color in cats.

Ralf J. Sommer works in the field of evolutionary developmental biology and developmental genetics. He established the nematode Pristionchus pacificus as model system for integrative studies in evolutionary biology. His lab has published more than 250 publications on this nematode, covering areas from genetics and development to genomics, bioinformatics, ecology and taxonomy. Currently, his research focuses on the origin and evolution of novelty and the significance of developmental plasticity and transgenerational inheritance for evolution. Sommer is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen, Germany, since 1999. He is adjunct professor at the University of Tübingen and previously worked as research fellow at CALTECH (1993-1995) after earning his Ph.D. at the LMU Munich. Sommer is a member of EMBO.

Dr. Piroska Szabó studies the flow of epigenetic information from parents to their offspring, with a focus on how epigenetic markers and DNA structure are remodeled during egg and sperm production, and how these markers are rewritten after fertilization. These processes have profound implications for fertility and embryo development.

Dr. Ye Tian earned her B.S. degree in Biotechnology from Beijing Normal University in 2005, followed by a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from a joint program of Beijing Normal University and the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing in 2010. Her academic journey continued with postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute and the University of California, Berkeley from 2010 to 2016. In 2016, she assumed the role of Principal Investigator at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.

Her research focuses on the regulatory mechanisms of mitochondrial stress and aging, resulting in several achievements. These include the discovery that neuronal mitochondria can transmit “stress memory” across generations by increasing mitochondrial DNA copy numbers in germ cells, enhancing offspring stress resistance and lifespan. Additionally, her work identified various cross-tissue mitochondrial signal exchanges influencing overall metabolism and aging. Furthermore, she uncovered the role of mitochondrial metabolites in regulating aging through epigenetic factors, providing a theoretical foundation for targeting metabolites to mitigate aging.

Dr. Ye Tian has published her research findings in prestigious international journals such as Cell (2010, 2016, 2018), Nature Cell Biology (2021), Developmental Cell (2022), Science Advances (2020), Cell Reports (2020, 2022), Nature Communications (2024), Aging Cell (2025), Journal of Cell Biology (2025), and SCIENCE CHINA Life Sciences (2025). Her contributions to the field have earned her accolades, including the 2021 Vcanbio Award for Bioscience and Medicine-Innovation Breakthrough, the 2022 Chinese Academy of Sciences Young Scientist Award, the 2022 Excellent Tutor Award of Yihai Kerry, the 2023 Gu Xiaocheng Lecture Award, and the 2024 Tecent Science Xplore Award. She is also a recipient of funding from the National Outstanding Youth Fund.

Dr. Nick Burton explores how our environment, especially microbes, can impact our health and the health of our offspring — even before they are born. His research has extensive implications for understanding how epigenetics contributes to human disease and how the environment we are exposed to today affects not only our own health, but also our children’s.

Dr. Derek Janssens explores the factors that give rise to blood cancers with the goal of informing improved diagnosis and treatment strategies. His research has contributed to powerful new methods that enable scientists to better study the complex factors that drive cancer development.

Dr. Adelheid (Heidi) Lempradl investigates how the dietary choices of parents may impact the health of their offspring in the hopes of translating her findings into new ways to prevent disease and create a healthier future.

Dr. J. Andrew Pospisilik seeks to understand how we become whom we become, and how our disease susceptibility is defined from early on in life, even before conception, with the long-term goal of being able to predict lifelong health outlook at birth.

Dr. Piroska Szabó studies the flow of epigenetic information from parents to their offspring, with a focus on how epigenetic markers are remodeled during egg and sperm production, and how these markers are rewritten after fertilization. These processes have profound implications on fertility and embryo development.