Professor Emma Whitelaw is a molecular biologist working at the La Trobe Institute of Molecular Sciences, Melbourne. After completing her undergraduate degree at the Australian National University, she obtained a D.Phil at the University of Oxford and remained working in London and Oxford for the next fifteen years. In 1991, she joined the University of Sydney and focused her research on transcription. Her most notable research achievements are in the area of epigenetics. More recently she has extended her studies to include the interaction between the environment and the epigenome. In 2008 she was awarded an Australia Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship available from the NHMRC, and in 2011 she became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.