Bernard Thienpont, PhD, holds a Master in Bioscience Engineering: Cell and Gene Biotechnology from the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Belgium), a Master in Economics and an inter-university post-graduate in Human Genetics. Following his PhD at KU Leuven on cardiovascular genetics, he moved to Cambridge, UK, to work at the Babraham Institute as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow on cardiac epigenetics, and afterwards at the VIB in Belgium as an FWO postdoctoral fellow on cardiac epigenetics. He started his own lab on epigenetics in 2018 at the KU Leuven. His Laboratory for Functional Epigenetics focuses on understanding the causes and functional consequences of epigenetics changes in development and disease, and this in a variety of model systems, aiming for both a better understanding and clinical improvements. His lab holds several national and international grants, and already made important contributions to understanding tumour tissue heterogeneity.