Jörn Walter - Biography#

Jörn Walter studied Biology at the TU Darmstadt and the Free University in Berlin. For his Ph.D. he joined the laboratory of Thomas Trautner at the MPI for molecular genetics in 1990 to work on bacterial epigenetics. In 1992 supported by EMBO and EU Fellowships he moved to Prof. Dr. Wolf Reik’s laboratory at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK, where he worked on mammalian epigenetics and studied mechanisms of genomic imprinting. He established novel technologies for sequencing and epigenetic mapping and analysed mechanisms controlling the silencing of mammalian transgenes. In 1994 he started his own lab at the MPI in Berlin where he discovered global epigenetic reprogramming by demethylation in the mouse zygote and the parental asymmetry in reprogramming. He also cloned and analysed the first eukaryotic de novo DNA methyltransferase from a fungus. In 2000 he became Chair of Genetics at Saarland University where he worked on reprogramming in the germ line and stability of imprinting. In 2007 he was one of the first scientists to systematically analyse epigenomic changes at the level of DNA methylation across a single human chromosome. In 2009 together with colleagues across the world he founded the International Human Epigenome Consortium IHEC and from 2011 he initiated and coordinated the German Epigenome Program DEEP. In 2018 he was among the founders of the European Flagship initiative LifeTime and became a steering board member of the German network for single cell-omics, coordinating the epigenomic efforts.

Jörn Walter is a member and co-chair of the scientific steering board of IHEC, the International Human Epigenome Consortium.

Besides coordinating the German Epigenome Program DEEP he has been a work package leader in several EU programs such as BLUEPRINT, SYSCID and NOTOX and co-coordinated a number of other larger national and international scientific networks. He is an elected member of the Life Science Panel of the Deutsche Forschungs-Gemeinschaft, DFG, and a member of the Gene-Technology task force of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and served as a scientific advisor for the German ministry of science and education.