Eileen E. M. Furlong

Education

Eileen Furlong obtained a Bachelor of Science degree at University College Dublin, and a PhD at the Conway institute at UCD, studying transcriptional regulation of immediate early response genes in the lab of Finian Martin.

Career and research After her PhD, Furlong was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, in Matthew P. Scott's lab, developing genomics tools to functionally dissect developmental programmes during embryogenesis. Furlong started her independent lab at EMBL in 2002, and was appointed head of department in 2009. Her research integrates genomics, genetics and computational biology approaches to functionally dissect the role of non-coding cis-regulatory elements in the regulation of gene expression. In particular, using mesoderm specification into different muscle primordia as a model system. Her group’s research has uncovered a number of properties of enhancers and enhancer-promoter communication, including pre-formed enhancer-promoter ‘loops’ and the ability of many enhancer’s to function even when larger chromatin topologies are perturbed, in addition to mechanisms that allow enhancers to withstand the effects of genetic variation, including collective transcription factor recruitment, genetic epistasis within enhancers and promoters, and extensive redundancy, which together contribute to canalization in developmental patterning.

Furlong’s work was credited in the development and application of genomic approaches to understand embryonic development, including the development of Drosophila microarrays, an automatic transgenic embryo sorter, Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) in embryos, tissue specific and single cell approaches - which combined with genetic manipulations provided insight into developmental programmes during embryogenesis at a genome-wide scale.

Furlong serves on the editorial boards of the scientific journals Developmental Cell, Development, Molecular Systems Biology, Current Opinion in Genetics Development, Current Opinion in Cell Biology, a European Research Council (ERC) panel member and an organiser of the international Conferences From Functional Genomics to Systems Biology, EMBL Transcription and Chromatin meeting, and a keynote speaker at national and international conferences including Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB).

Awards and honors Furlong was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2013, and DeCRypT 2019-2023. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2022. In 2026, she was made a member of the Royal Irish Academy.