Eileen Furlong elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
Eileen Furlong, Head of Genome Biology Unit at EMBL Heidelberg, was elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina for her outstanding research in the section ‘Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine’.
Eileen Furlong. Credit: Kinga Lubowiecka/EMBL
In her work, Eileen Furlong combines developmental biology, genetics, genomics, and computational biology to explore the mechanisms that not only regulate our genome, but also control the overall complexity of a developing embryo. She is known for her work on genome regulation and for developing new genomics technologies to dissect embryonic development. She was an early adopter of tools such as machine learning to understand embryonic enhancers and developmental programming.
The Furlong Group’s research has contributed to bridging the gap between the disciplines of developmental biology and genomics, elevating our understanding of how our genome is regulated and discovering mechanisms that play decisive roles in cell fate decisions during embryonic development.
Eileen Furlong received her PhD from the Department of Pharmacology and Biotechnology at University College Dublin. She was then a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University until 2002, when she moved to EMBL Heidelberg, initially as a group leader. She has been head of the EMBL’s Genome Biology Unit since 2009.
Furlong has already secured two ERC Advanced Grants, was honoured with the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2022, is a Fellow of the Royal Society and elected EMBO member, and a Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) member of a number of the top life science institutions in Europe.
Furlongjoins many illustrious EMBL researchers and alumni as a member of Leopoldina, including Director General Edith Heard and recent Emeritus Anne Ephrussi.
