Adelheid (Heidi) Lempradl, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Metabolism and Nutritional Programming

Areas of Expertise

Epigenetics, metabolism, intergenerational inheritance, nutritional programming

Biography

Dr. Adelheid (Heidi) Lempradl is an assistant professor in Van Andel Institute’s Metabolic and Nutritional Programming group, where she investigates how the parental metabolic state is transmitted through generations. She earned her diploma and her Ph.D. from University of Vienna, where she used fluorescent probes to study the structure and folding of lipid membranes and RNAs. She continued her RNA work as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Leonie Ringrose at University of Austria, followed by a fellowship in the lab of Dr. Asifa Akhtar at Max Planck Institute of Immunology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany. Most recently, she was a fellow in the lab of Dr. J. Andrew Pospisilik, also at Max Planck. Her research was the first to demonstrate that acute paternal diet of Drosophila can reprogram offspring metabolism. This work also identified the first epigenetic signature of obesity that is conserved across species, which established the value of Drosophila as a model for intergenerational inheritance. She was the recipient of the 2002 DOC-fFORTE Ph.D. Fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, was nominated for the Helmholtz Young Investigator Diabetes (HelDi) Award in 2018, and has given invited talks at numerous meetings and symposia, including the keynote address at the SETAC/iEOS Joint Topic Meeting on Environmental and (Eco) Toxicological Omics and Epigenetics.