PhD. Patrick Daniel Varga-Weisz

Patrick Varga-Weisz, Ph.D. is a lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Essex and a visiting scientist at Babraham Institute, Cambridge, UK

Patrick Varga-Weisz was born in Neustadt and der Weinstrasse, Southwest Germany, a town not far from Heidelberg and the French border.  He did his undergraduate degree at the University of Tübingen (1983-1986) in biochemistry and his Ph.D. in “Biochemistry and Biophysics” at Oregon State University, USA. Patrick then joined the laboratory of Ken van Holde, also at OSU and this brought him into the chromatin field.  He continued his studies of chromatin at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, Heidelberg) where he discovered fundamental mechanisms of chromatin remodelling. Patrick became a group leader at the Marie Curie Research Institute, Surrey, UK in 1997 and the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, from 2004-2017.

In these institutes, he contributed to our understanding of fundamental mechanisms of chromatin dynamics, gene regulation and epigenetic inheritance.  He joined the University of Essex in January 2018 while remaining visiting scientist at Babraham Institute. In his recent research, Patrick studies how the epigenome is affected by aging and he explore how chromatin dynamics shape host-microbiome interactions in the gut.