Prof. Bernard Thienpont has a multidisciplinary background in both bio-engineering and Genetics. He continually strives to bridge clinical and basic research. During his PhD he was trained in cardiovascular genomics, developing novel analysis methods to identify cryptic chromosomal aberrations in children born with heart defects. He next moved to Cambridge, UK to work on the epigenomics of cardiovascular diseases, aiming to understand how pathologically hypertrophied hearts re-express their fetal gene programme.  During subsequent work at the VIB Center for Cancer Biology, he studied how hypoxia interacts with DNA methylation in tumors, and how these changes impact the hypoxia response. We showed that tumour hypoxia impedes demethylation and causes DNA hypermethylation. Since the end of 2017, Bernard heads the Laboratory for Functional Epigenetics at the KU Leuven Department of Human Genetics. He developed a comprehensive analysis of cellular heterogeneity in tumours from lung cancer patients, and tools to analyze cell-free DNA methylation at high resolution. His lab currently focuses on deciphering the epigenomic control of cancer cell heterogeneity, and on the development and implementation of novel single cell omics tools.