Fides Zenk, PhD

Fides Zenk is an assistant professor of Epigenenomics of Neurodevelopmental Disorders at EPFL, Geneva, Switzerland. She did her PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Epigenetic and Immunobiology in Freiburg, Germany, focusing on the epigenetic regulation of early embryonic development. During her postdoctoral training at the ETH in Basel, Switzerland, she developed technologies to map histone modifications in single cells and reconstruct developmental trajectories. Together with her team, she uses brain organoids to understand how chromatin dysregulation can cause complex developmental disorders and alter cellular differentiation during early human development. Her lab has extensive expertise in single-cell epigenomics and chromatin biology using organoids and complex tissues. Her lab will generate and analyze single-cell epigenomic data to characterize heterochromatin erosion in the aging and Parkinson’s disease brain. Her team will develop and apply advanced single-cell chromatin profiling and computational integration approaches, and link epigenetic alterations to cell-type-specific vulnerability and disease heterogeneity.