Randy L. Jirtle, Ph.D.

Professor Randy L. Jirtle joined the Duke University Department of Radiology in 1977, and headed the Epigenetics and Imprinting Laboratory until 2012. He is now a Professor of Epigenetics in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC. Jirtle’s research interests are in epigenetics, genomic imprinting, and the fetal origins of disease susceptibility. He is known for his groundbreaking studies linking environmental exposures early in life to the development of adult diseases through changes in the epigenome, and for determining the evolutionary origin of genomic imprinting in mammals and the human imprintome. He has published over 200 peer reviewed articles, a book on Liver Regeneration and Carcinogenesis, and two books on Environmental Epigenomics in Health and Disease. He was honored in 2006 with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2007, he was a featured scientist on the NOVA television  program on epigenetics entitled Ghost in Your Genes, and was nominated for Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.”  Jirtle was presented the Linus Pauling Award from the Institute of Functional Medicine in 2014. In 2017, ShortCutsTV  produced an English documentary, Are You What Your Mother Ate? The Agouti Mouse Study, based upon his pioneering epigenetic research. Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute presented Jirtle with the Research and Innovation Leadership Award in 2019. Dr. Jirtle was also received the Alexander Hollaender Award in 2019 at the 50th annual meeting of the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society.