Benjamin Walters, PhD

Ben was born in Liverpool, England, and earned his bachelors degree in Biomedical Sciences from Liverpool John Moores University in 2014. The following year he earned a Masters of Research degree in Translational Medicine at the University of Manchester before pursuing a PhD in the "Epithelial and Developmental Epigenetics lab" of Dr Chin Yan Lim at the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology located in Singapore. Here, his interest in epigenetics developed as he undertook a project investigating the roles of two histone modifier paralogues in epidermal homeostasis. After completing his PhD in 2020, Ben joined Bluma Lesch's Lab at Yale University as a postdoctoral associate.

My research is focused on understanding how epimutations in the paternal germline can potentiate cancer susceptibility in a transgenerational fashion. To investigate this hypothesis, I specifically induce such epimutations in mice by conditionally deleting Utx, a H3K27me3 demethylase, and characterise the molecular and phenotypic consequences in genetically wildtype offspring. Given that this epigenetic modifier is known to be active at bivalent domains in a developmental context, I am also investigating links between transgenerational phenotypes and potential changes to the poised state of sperm cells provoked by loss of Utx. Therefore, my research overlaps with two key themes of the Lesch lab: epigenetic memory and gene regulation via bivalent chromatin.