Professor Myriam Hemberger

Myriam Hemberger trained at the University of Freiburg and Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany, and as postdoctoral fellow in Toronto and at the University of Calgary, Canada.

From 2004-2018 she held a Group Leader position at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK. In October 2018, she joint the University of Calgary as Full Professor in the Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Medical Genetics. She holds a Tier I Canda Research Chair and is also Program Director of the Precision Medicine & Disease Mechanisms program at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute (ACHRI).

Her scientific expertise is centered on early developmental processes that lead to normal placentation and, consequently, a healthy reproductive outcome. In 2019 she was awarded the March of Dimes and Richard B Johnson Prize in Developmental Biology and, in 2024, the Killam Annual Professorship award for her contributions to the field.

Over the past years her research has focussed on trophoblast stem cells (TSCs), the unique stem cell population of the placental cell lineage. She contributed to the groundbreaking establishment of hTSCs from the early human placenta, and has contributed with numerous studies to our understanding of the transcriptional and epigenetic networks that operate in murine TSCs. Myriam led a mouse phenotyping screen that established the first systematic analysis of the impact of embryonic lethal gene mutations on placentation, and her lab also studies the impact of the endometrial environment on uterine-trophoblast interactions during early development, in particular in the context of advanced maternal age.