Patrick Heun studied Biology at Goethe University Frankfurt and received his doctorate from the University of Lausanne. After postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he became junior group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg. He later joined the University of Edinburgh, where he was appointed Senior Lecturer in 2014 and promoted to Full Professor in 2022. Since 2023, he has been Professor of Molecular Genetics at the Technical University of Darmstadt.
He is head of Department of Molecular Genetics at the Technical University of Darmstadt. His research group investigates the organization, establishment, and maintenance of specialized chromatin states within the genome, with particular on on centromeres, using Drosophila and human tissue culture cells as model systems. His teaching focuses on molecular genetics, epigenetics, and cell biology.
