Group Leader

Max Fitz-James grew up in France and moved to the UK to study Natural Sciences (Genetics) at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge. He then obtained an MSci and PhD as part of a Wellcome 4-year PhD programme in Cell Biology at the the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh. His primary project in the lab of Robin Allshire investigated the unusual structure of mitotic chromosomes that assembles over foreign DNA in mammalian cells. This research concluded that large domains of constitutive heterochromatin altered the appearance of the mitotic chromosome by affecting the activity of condensin, resulting in an organisation into shorter chromatin loops.

Aiming to combine his interests in evolution and epigenetics, he then took a post-doc position in the lab of Giacomo Cavalli at the Institut de Génétique Humaine in Montpellier to study Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance. This project aimed to study the molecular mechanisms underpinning the inheritance of the Polycomb-dependent H3K27me3 epigenetic mark. Using a synthetic biology system he developed to induce chromatin contacts between two loci, he showed that artificially recapitulating the chromatin contacts observed in this experimental system was sufficient to induce inheritance of H3K27me3, and implicated the chromatin organising protein GAF in these contacts.

He brought this project with him to work with Peter Sarkies at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, for another post-doc in which he showed that this inheritance of H3K27me3 in Drosophila was independent of small RNAs.

He obtained a Wellcome Career Development award to establish his own research group at the Department of Biology, University of Oxford, in 2025 with the stated aims of further investigating the molecular mechanisms and broader role of epigenetic inheritance as well as the epigenetic basis of insect polyphenism.