9th Annual Chromatin and Epigenetics Symposium

As a Distinguished Investigator at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Shiv Grewal, PhD, has dedicated his career to pioneering research in epigenetics. His groundbreaking work has provided fundamental insights into heterochromatin formation, a crucial process that inhibits inappropriate gene expression and ensures genome stability.

After earning his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1992 as a Cambridge-Nehru scholar, he made significant advances in the field during his postdoctoral fellowship at NCI. There, Dr. Grewal discovered that heterochromatic gene silencing can be stably propagated as epigenetic states through meiosis and inherited in cis. Specifically, Dr. Grewal was first to show that heterochromatin self-propagate in cis, illustrating that the unit of inheritance can constitute more than DNA.

In 1998, he joined the faculty at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he uncovered a highly conserved connection between RNAi and heterochromatin assembly that revolutionized the thinking on how complex genomes are assembled into specialized chromatin domains. This discovery was named “Breakthrough of the Year 2002” by Sciencemagazine.

Returning to the NCI as a Senior Investigator in 2003, he continued to push the boundaries of epigenetic research. Dr. Grewal’s work has elucidated how heterochromatin is assembled in different parts of the genome and uncovered fundamental principles that govern its epigenetic inheritance. The significance of his research is evidenced by the fact that three of his papers are considered historic discoveries in the past 50 years by Nature. His contributions to the field have been widely recognized.

Dr. Grewal has been honored with prestigious awards including the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, NIH Merit Award, and the NIH Directors’ Award. In 2011, he was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at NCI. The highlight of his career came in 2014 when he was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, acknowledging his significant and lasting impact on the scientific community.