Professor Wolf Reik

Wolf Reik obtained his MD from the University of Hamburg. He did his thesis work with Rudolf Jaenisch, and postdoctoral work with Azim Surani in Cambridge. He became a Fellow of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine at Cambridge and subsequently the Head of the Epigenetics Programme at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge and its Associate Director. He is honorary Professor of Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge and Associate Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he is a founding member of the Centre for Single Cell Genomics. He is a Member of EMBO, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Member of the Academia Europaea.

His research interests are in epigenetics, particularly in epigenetic reprogramming during mammalian development and its role in stem cell biology and inheritance. His current work addresses the mechanisms of genome-wide demethylation in the mammalian germ line, links between reprogramming and pluripotency, epigenetic regulation of cell fate decisions in early development, and the role of epigenetic mechanisms in ageing. His lab also develops new epigenomics technologies especially in single cells. He has published more than 250 research papers with an h-index of 120.