Isabelle Mansuy is professor in Neuroepigenetics at the Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich and the Department of Health Science and Technology of the ETH Zurich. She holds a Ph.D. in developmental neurobiology from the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France for a doctoral thesis conducted at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel. She trained as postdoc in the lab of Eric Kandel at the Center for Learning and Memory at Columbia University in New York and then established her own lab as assistant professor in neurobiology at ETH Zurich.
I. Mansuy initially conducted research in molecular cognition and made landmark discoveries on the mechanisms of forgetting by identifying memory suppressors in the mammalian brain. In parallel, in early 2000s, she started to work on epigenetic inheritance and is one of the pioneers and founders of this new research discipline. I Mansuy is studying the epigenetic basis of heritable traits induced by life experiences. Her work demonstrated that adverse conditions in early life such as traumatic stress can alter behavior, physiology and metabolism across multiple generations in mice, and that inheritance depends on non-DNA factors in germ cells, particularly sperm RNA. This discovery established the existence of an RNA-based form of heredity in mammals independent from the DNA sequence, …(text continues on next page)... similarly to what’s known in plants and invertebrates. The fundaments of these findings in mice are being validated by translational studies in trauma patients in humans. This research provides important mechanistic advances about the influence of the environment on brain and body functions and is highly relevant for heritable environmental diseases. It has a major impact on evolution and offers an alternative to classical genetics for rapid organismic plasticity. It also has important societal and ethical implications. I. Mansuy co-authored >200 research articles, reviews and book chapters in neurosciences and epigenetics. She also published a book on epigenetics for the lay public in French and German “Reprenons le contrôle de nos gènes”, Larousse (April 2019) and “Wir können unsere Gene steuern” Berlin Verlag (Aug 2020). She is active in multiple scientific and research funding boards, is member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC), and the European Molecular Biology Organization. She is Knight in the National Order of Merit and in the Legion of Honor in France.
