Vijay Tiwari's Biography

Vijay Tiwari, Group Leader, Institute of Molecular Biology

Dr. Tiwari obtained an MSc in Molecular & Human Genetics at Banaras University, a Centre of Excellence in the Life Sciences in India. He then moved to the epigenetics lab of Prof. Rolf Ohlsson at Uppsala University in Sweden for his doctoral studies where he completed a thesis with distinction. His research continued very successfully as a postdoc with Prof. Stephen Baylin, a pioneer in cancer epigenetics, at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and then with Prof. Dirk Schübeler, who is a European leader in epigenomics, at the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel.Dr. Tiwari’s PhD studies revealed how an antisense RNA can control the functional properties of a regulatory region in the genome and he elucidated how regulatory factors organize higher order structures in chromatin to regulate gene expression. As a postdoc, his work provided evidence that epigenetic mechanisms regulate chromatin compaction and accessibility for gene regulation. Furthermore, his research found that epigenetic machineries mediate physical proximity between distant chromosomal elements that further serves to simultaneously regulate co-expressed genes. His recent work provided the first evidence that a MAP kinase directly binds to development-specific gene promoters during cellular differentiation for transcriptional regulation via epigenetic mechanisms. Dr. Tiwari has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Junior Research Fellowship from the Government of India Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, funding from Zoologiska foundation, Sweden, a Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellowship, an European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) fellowship and a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (IIF).