About Dr Alice Sherrard

Alice completed her PhD at the University of Bristol in 2019, where she worked with the lab of Robert Grosse and identified a role for nuclear F-actin in de-condensing chromatin and expanding the nucleus after cell division.

For her postdoctoral studies, Alice first joined the lab of Clodagh O’Shea at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, and in 2020 moved to Yale University in the lab of Antonio Giraldez. Through her postdoctoral research, Alice developed cutting-edge electron microscopy methods to label specific proteins and quantify the associated nucleosome-scale structure by electron and cryo-electron microscopy. This identified chromatin signatures linked to stages of mouse embryonic development and defined a conserved role for Lamin A/C in regulating the first lineage decision in the mammalian embryo.

Applying these methods to study chromatin changes during Zygotic Genome Activation (ZGA), Alice identified five key structural subclasses of chromatin and revealed a role of high chromatin packing in early transcriptional activation.

To support this work, Alice secured funding from National Institute of Health for Child Health and Development in 2025 (K99/R00 grant) and was awarded an EMBO long-term postdoctoral fellowship.

She further received prizes from the Society of Developmental Biology (SDB) and the International Society of Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), and lead and obtained funding for several major outreach initiatives.