Dr Jennifer Frost – Principal Investigator
Jenny carried out her undergraduate studies at the University of Durham, and an MSc in Human Reproductive Biology at the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology at Imperial College London. With the support of an MRC studentship, she completed a PhD on placental imprinting in humans with Professor Gudrun Moore at the UCL Institute of Child Health, followed by a postdoctoral research position with Professor Rebecca Oakey at King’s College London, focused on fetal growth disorders.
Jenny changed fields to study genomic imprinting in flowering plants, with Professor Bob Fischer at the University of California Berkeley. At Berkeley she delineated the role of the chromatin remodeller FACT in DNA demethylation, transposon regulation and genomic imprinting in the Arabidopsis endosperm – an orthologue of the placenta. She moved back to London in 2016, joining Dr Miguel Branco’s lab in the Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London, where she secured a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on transposable elements in the human placenta.
Jenny was awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development award in March 2024, to study transposons in pregnancy complications. Jenny’s lab is based in the Medical and Molecular Genetics department at King’s College London (located in the Tower Wing of the Guys Campus) and will be recruiting lab members soon.
Click here to watch Jenny discussing epigenetics with Susan Ozanne and Amanda Fisher at a British Heart Foundation and Crick Institute Alumni event ‘Epigenetics: Beyond Nature vs Nurture’ in London in 2024.