Fides Zenk and her research group investigate the epigenetic mechanisms that enable cells of the human nervous system to acquire their specific cell fates and establish stable cellular identities. To this end, she employs human brain organoids as a model system to study the dynamics of chromatin states and gene regulation during early brain development. Since 2023, she has been an Assistant Professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) at the Brain Mind Institute.
Fides Zenk studied Biology at the University of Kassel and obtained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, where she investigated the inheritance of epigenetic regulatory patterns during early embryonic development. From 2020 onwards, she was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, where she developed single-cell mapping approaches for epigenetic modifications to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying cell differentiation. Her research integrates developmental biology, epigenomics, and advanced stem cell models to understand the principles of human neurogenesis and how these processes are disrupted in disease.
