Abstract

Host: Ritwick Sawarkar

Sophie Polo graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, France in 2002. She received her PhD in 2006 working with Geneviève Almouzni at the Curie Institute in Paris, France on the role of chromatin assembly factors in cell proliferation and genome stability. She then joined Steve Jackson’s laboratory at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, UK for her postdoctoral studies. There, she developed an interest in the response to DNA breaks and characterized the function of chromatin remodelers in this context. Back in France, she obtained a permanent staff scientist position in 2011, and she was awarded the Olga Sain prize from la Ligue contre le Cancer in the same year. Sophie established her own group at the Epigenetics and Cell Fate Centre in 2013 at Paris Diderot University, with the support of a young investigator program from the French National Research Agency, followed by Starting and Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council. Sophie was selected EMBO Young Investigator in 2017 and promoted research director in 2018. Sophie Polo has been leading the Epigenome integrity group in Paris for the past 12 years. She has a long-standing expertise in studying the interplay between chromatin plasticity and genome integrity. Research in her laboratory combines cutting-edge imaging technologies with proteomics and next-generation sequencing to decipher how genome and epigenome maintenance are coordinated in mammalian cells challenged by genotoxic stress.