Geraldine Seydoux -  Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Geraldine Seydoux is a developmental biologist whose research focuses on the development of the germline. She has found that global inhibition of mRNA transcription is an essential first step to establish the embryonic germline, and that post-transcriptional mechanisms of gene regulation are essential during germ cell differentiation. Her lab has also developed methods for genome editing that take advantage of a highly efficient gene conversion mechanism in the germline.  Most recently her lab has identified a family of intrinsically-disordered proteins that stabilize RNA (germ) granules by functioning as Pickering agents.  

Geraldine Seydoux obtained her Ph.D. in 1991 from Princeton University with Iva Greenwald. She did her post-doctoral training at the Carnegie Institution of Washington with Andy Fire before joining the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1995. In 1999, she was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the National Institutes of Health, and in 2001 she received a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  She was appointed an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2005, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and EMBO.