Edith Heard is Director of the Genetics and Developmental Biology Department at the Institut Curie (Paris, France). She obtained her PhD at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (London, UK) and her post-doctoral training at the Pasteur Institute (Paris, France). She was appointed group leader at the Curie Institute in Paris in 2001. Dr. Heard has a long-term interest in epigenetic mechanisms in mammals, and in particular in the process of X-chromosome inactivation. Her work has revealed the remarkable dynamics of X-chromosome inactivation during early mammalian development. She also recently showed that the X chromosome becomes reorganized in the nucleus during the process of X inactivation. Dr. Heard has been awarded the Thoday Prize for Genetics (Cambridge University), the Schlumberger Foundation prize for research, the CNRS Silver Medal, the Jean Hamburger Prize (City of Paris). She was elected as an EMBO member in 2005 and was recently awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator grant.