Simon Elsässer

Biography

Dr. Elsässer is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Chemical Biology and Translational Medicine, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, and a Science for Life Laboratory Fellow. He is interested in Epigenetics – more precisely how our genetic information is annotated in every human cell to remember stimuli or insults from other cells in our body, or the outside world. He wants to know: how does each of the trillion cells in the human body ‘remember’ its purpose and identity. His research into the mechanism of epigenetic inheritance will help us to understand how aberrant epigenetic changes cause disease, for example how tumor suppressor genes – important guardians of the genome – are switched off to promote cancer. It will provide molecular-level information for developing therapeutic strategies to ‘correct’ such epigenetic mistakes.
Dr. Elsässer has read Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and Biophysics at Harvard University, Boston, USA. He received his PhD from The Rockefeller University, New York, USA in 2012. He performed his postdoctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and has been named a Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has received prestigious fellowships from DAAD, Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, EMBO, Cambridge Herchel Smith Trust. He has attended the Interdisciplinary Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 2015 as a Young Scientist nominee of the European Commission.