Ana Pombo is Vice-speaker of the Systems Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease Research Program of the MDC Berlin in the Helmholtz Association and Deputy Scientific Director of Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) at the MDC.
She received her PhD in Physiological Sciences from the University of Oxford (UK) in 1998, which she developed at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. She received a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship and remained in Oxford until 2000. She became a Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Systems (MRC-LMS, UK). In 2012, she founded the Integrative Biology Section, MRC-LMS, and became a Professor in Cell Biology at Imperial College London. In 2013, she moved to Germany as a Group Leader at BIMSB, supported by a Helmholtz Association Distinguished Professorship, and became Professor (W3) at the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2019, she serves as Deputy Scientific Director of BIMSB, MDC, and from 2022, as Vice-speaker of the Systems Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease research program of the MDC in the Helmholtz Association. She was the lead applicant of the NIMSB Teaming for Excellence project and NIMSB spokesperson at MDC. She has been a member of the NIH Common Funds 4D-Nucleome consortium since 2015, and co-coordinates the DFG Priority Program SPP2202 “Spatial Genome Architecture in Development and Disease”. Her research focuses on decoding the regulatory roles of 3D genome structure in gene expression and cellular memory. Her lab has pioneered high-resolution imaging and genomics technologies to study 3D genome architecture.