Julie Ahringer

Julie Ann Ahringer FMedSci is an American Professor of Genetics and Genomics, and a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the Gurdon Institute and the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.She leads aresearch lab investigating the control of gene expression.

Her laboratory carried out the first systematic inactivation of the majority of genes in an animal through constructing and screening a genome-wide RNA interference library for the nematode C. elegans. Ahringer studies the control of gene expression and genome architecture in development, using C. elegans as a model system.

Ahringer is from Miami, Florida and was educated at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry in 1984. She completed her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison while working with Judith Kimble. She carried out postdoctoral research at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge with John Graham White.

Ahringer became a group leader in the Department of Genetics in Cambridge in 1996, then moved to the Gurdon Institute in 1998. Her laboratory carried out the first systematic inactivation of the majority of genes in any animal by constructing and screening a genome-wide RNAi library for Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). Ahringer's research group studies the regulation of chromatin structure and function in gene expression and genome organization using the nematode C. elegans as a model to understand development and disease. The Ahringer Lab research is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Ahringer was elected to the EMBO Membership in 2003 and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2007. She delivered the Francis Crick lecture prize of the Royal Society in 2004. In 2020 she was awarded the George W. Beadle Award of the Genetics Society of Americafor outstanding contributions to genetics.

She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Medical Research Council (MRC) along with many other eminent scientists.

Ahringer married Richard Durbin in 1996, with whom she has two children.