Moshe Szyf's Biography

Moshe Szyf, Professor, McGill University

Szyf received his Ph. D from the Hebrew University Medical School in 1985 and did his postdoctoral fellowship in Genetics at Harvard Medical School, joined the department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill University in Montreal in 1989 as an assistant professor and currently holds a James McGill Professorship and GlaxoSmithKline-CIHR Chair in Pharmacology at McGill University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the founding co-director of the Sackler Institute for Epigenetics and Psychobiology at McGill. 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 three 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”. The Szyf lab is interested in understanding basic epigenetic mechanisms and their broad implications in human behavior, health and disease as well as their therapeutic and diagnostic implications.