Julie Ann Ahringer is an American/British Professor of Genetics and Genomics, Director of the Gurdon Institute and a member of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.
Her laboratory carried out the first systematic inactivation of the majority of genes in an animal through constructing and screening a genome-wide RNA interference library for the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
Education
Ahringer is from
Miami and was educated at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in
Chemistry in 1984.
[Julie Ahringer ] She completed her
PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison while working with
Judith Kimble.
Research and career
After her Phd, she carried out postdoctoral research at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge with John Graham White.
Ahringer became a group leader in the department of
genetics in Cambridge in 1996, before moving to the
Gurdon Institute in 1998.
Her laboratory carried out the first systematic inactivation of the majority of genes in any animal by constructing and screening a genome-wide
RNAi library for
Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). Ahringer's research group studies the regulation of chromatin structure and function in gene expression and genome organization using the nematode
C. elegans as a model to understand development and disease. The Ahringer Lab research is funded by the
Wellcome Trust.
[
]
Honors and awards
Ahringer was elected to the EMBO Membership in 2003[ ] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021.
She serves as a member of the scientific advisory board of the Medical Research Council (MRC) along with many other eminent scientists.
Personal life
Ahringer married Richard Durbin in 1996, with whom she has two children.[ ]
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