Anne Ephrussi

Anne Ephrussi received her A.B. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in 1979. She obtained her Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, for her work on the immunoglobulin heavy chain enhancer, in the laboratory of Susumu Tonegawa. Dr. Ephrussi began her work in developmental genetics as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Ruth Lehmann at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, where she cloned the Drosophila maternal effect gene oskar and showed that Oskar is the posterior determinant that induces germ cell formation in the fly. Dr. Ephrussi joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) as a group leader in 1992. Combining genetic, biochemical and cell biological approaches, her laboratory studies the mechanisms underlying intracellular RNA transport and localized translational control, as well as the cell polarization and molecular motors mediating RNA localization in the Drosophila oocyte and nervous system. Dr. Ephrussi is Head of the Developmental Biology Unit at EMBL and Coordinator of the EMBL International Center for Advanced Training.