Giacomo Cavalli

Giacomo Cavalli studied Biology at Parma University in Italy, he took his PhD in natural sciences at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland in 1994, and did his post-doc in the lab of Renato Paro, at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, from 1995 to 1998. In 1999, he became junior group leader at IGH in Montpellier, France. In 2002, he was made senior PI, in 2007 he became head of the Genome Dynamics department at IGH and he directed the Institute from 2011 to 2014.Giacomo Cavalli discovered transgenerational inheritance of chromatin states in metazoan by working on Polycomb and Trithorax group proteins in Drosophila during his post doc in the lab of Renato Paro.The Cavalli lab has shown that the 3D structure of chromosomes can be epigenetically heritable and that it contributes to genome regulation. Furthermore, they provided the first high-resolution description of the principles of genome folding in metazoans.Finally, the Cavalli lab showed that Polycomb proteins regulate cell proliferation and have tumor suppression activity in flies.