CrickConnect and the British Heart Foundation are delighted to invite you to join us at an exclusive panel discussion - EPIGENETICS: beyond nature vs nurture?

How much do our genes determine our fate, and how much can we change it? How does our environment interact with our genes to affect our development, ageing, and susceptibility to illness? How can we use epigenetics to improve our health and well-being?

To explore these questions and more, join us for an engaging and informative panel discussion, chaired by BBC Health and Science Correspondent, James Gallagher.

Find out more about our panellists:

Professor Dame Mandy Fisher | Whitney Professor of Biochemistry, University of Oxford

Dame Amanda Fisher is the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. She a cell biologist who has contributed to multiple areas of biology, including determining the function of several genes in HIV and describing the importance of a gene's location within the cell nucleus.

Dame Mandy's lab moved to Oxford from Imperial College London, where she led the Institute of Clinical Sciences and was Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS) at the Hammersmith Hospital campus for more than 10 years.

She has a long-standing interest in understanding the establishment and maintenance of cell fate. As a post-doc at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA, she obtained the first biologically active isolates of HIV early on in the AIDS pandemic. She returned to the UK to start her own laboratory at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, the forerunner of the LMS, focusing initially on lymphocyte development, and subsequently broadening out to other classical cell fate models, including embryonic stem cells. Her more recent research investigates the transmission of epigenetic information through mitosis and the effect of the maternal environment on epigenetic gene regulation.

In addition to her major research contributions, Dame Mandy has pioneered highly impactful schemes to support the careers of scientists and to promote public understanding of science, such as the Suffrage Science Award, celebrating and inspiring the careers of women in science.

In the 2017 New Year Honours, Fisher was awarded a DBE for services to medical research and the public understanding of science.

Dr Jennifer Frost | Assistant Professor & Wellcome Career Development Fellow, King's College London

Dr Jennifer Frost is an Assistant Professor and Wellcome Career Development Fellow at King's College London.

Jennifer's lab, which secured funding in March 2024, will investigate the role of mobile genetic elements (transposons) in pregnancy complications. These elements are, in general, epigenetically silenced, though Jennifer's previous research has shown that a subset of them have important activity in gene regulation in the placenta, where they are precisely epigenetically regulated.

The Frost lab will investigate epigenetic and genetic variation at these sequences in complications of pregnancy, including fetal growth restriction, preterm birth, and pre-eclampsia.

Jennifer completed her Undergraduate degree at the University of Durham, and her PhD at Imperial College London. She then undertook postdoctoral training at the University of California Berkeley, followed by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London, and finally a postdoctoral position at the Francis Crick Institute.

Professor Susan Ozanne | Professor of Developmental Endocrinology, University of Cambridge

Susan Ozanne is Professor of Developmental Endocrinology in the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science Metabolic Research Laboratories & the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, at the University of Cambridge.

She obtained a first class honours degree in Biochemistry from the University of Edinburgh, in 1990. She then went to Christ’s College at the University of Cambridge where she obtained her PhD in 1994. Prior to her current appointment she was a BHF Senior Fellow. She has also previously held a Diabetes UK RD Lawrence Fellowship and a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship. Her research interests are focused on understanding the mechanistic basis of the relationship between suboptimal early nutrition and risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease in later life.

Professor Ozanne is the author of over 250 peer-reviewed full papers on the early origins of health and disease and is an elected member of the council of the Society for the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease.