Patrick Heun studied Biology at Goethe University Frankfurt and completed his PhD at the University of Lausanne. In 2001, he began working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute and later moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the USA. In 2005, he became a junior group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg. In 2014, he joined the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh as a Senior Lecturer, where he was appointed Full Professor in 2022. Since 2023, he has been Professor of Molecular Genetics at TU Darmstadt.
He heads the Department of Molecular Genetics there. His research focuses on the organization, establishment, and maintenance of specialized chromatin states, particularly the epigenetic inheritance of centromere identity, using Drosophila and human tissue culture cells as model systems. His teaching focuses on molecular genetics, epigenetics, and cell biology.
