Joined the Board in October 2023

Professor Petra Hajkova is the Deputy Director at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences (MRC LMS) where she leads the Reprogramming and Chromatin research group. Next to her MRC role, Petra is also a Professor of Developmental Epigenetics at the Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London.

She completed her first degree at the Charles University in Prague and then undertook a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. For her postdoctoral research she joined Professor Azim Surani at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, UK to work on epigenetic reprogramming. Petra started her independent research group at MRC LMS in 2009; her research focuses on elucidating how epigenetic information is transmitted, erased and re-instated during mammalian lifecycles.

Petra was elected an EMBO Young Investigator in 2013, awarded the Mary Lyon medal by the Genetics Society in 2017, became an EMBO member in 2018 and elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2022.

More information on Petra’s research expertise can be found on the group’s page on the MRC-LMS website.