Moshe Szyf

Szyf received his Ph. D from the Hebrew University and did his postdoctoral fellowship in Genetics at Harvard Medical School, joined the department in 1989 and currently holds a James McGill Professorship and GlaxoSmithKline-CIHR Chair in Pharmacology. He is the founding co-director of the Sackler Institute for Epigenetics and Psychobiology at McGill and is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Experience-based Brain and Biological Development program.  Szyf has been the founder of the first “Pharma” to develop epigenetic pharmacology “Methylgene Inc.” and the first journal in epigenetics “Epigenetics”.  Szyf lab has proposed two decades ago that DNA methylation is a prime therapeutic target in cancer and other diseases and has postulated and provided the first set of evidence that the “social environment” early in life can alter DNA methylation launching the emerging field of “social epigenetics”.