Nouria Hernandez
Nouria Hernandez, now emerita, was professor and director of the Center for Integrative Genomics of the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at the University of Lausanne from 2005 to 2021. She was the rector of the University of Lausanne from 2016 to 2021.
As a scientist, she studied mechanisms of mammalian gene expression regulation. During her doctoral studies, she succeeded in uncoupling pre-mRNA splicing from transcription using an in vitro system. She then studied the mechanisms governing transcription of some of the essential players in the pre-mRNA splicing reaction, the U small nuclear RNAs. This led to the realization that RNA polymerase II and RNA polymerase III, two enzymes that synthesize RNA molecules using DNA as a template, use several common transcription factors. She then focused on transcription by RNA polymerase III and on the consequences of deregulating this enzyme in the mouse, thus uncovering links between the RNA polymerase III transcription process and the regulation of growth and metabolism, in particular lipid metabolism.
Hernandez obtained a diploma in Biology from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Geneva and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Heidelberg. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, she became a senior staff investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and remained there until 2005. She was selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to become an investigator in 1999.