Impact
Wolf Reik is a Distinguished Investigator in Discovery Science at Altos Labs' Cambridge Institute of Science and an honorary Professor of Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge. He previously headed the Epigenetics Programme and then served as Director of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge. His laboratory discovered global epigenetic reprogramming in mammalian development and characterised its mechanisms and consequences. More recently the group developed single-cell multi-omics technologies to study cell-fate decisions in development and how cell fate and function degrade during ageing. Applying epigenetic reprogramming to resetting cellular age, his team developed a protocol by which human cells can be substantially rejuvenated without losing their cell identity, work relevant to the partial-reprogramming approaches now pursued in longevity research. His 2026 publications include work on cell-to-cell variability and gain of methylation at polycomb CpG islands as a hallmark of ageing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Metrics
- h-index 153 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
521 works · 77,939 citations · h-index 136 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Evolution and Functions of Long Noncoding RNAs ↗ 2009 · 5,172 citations
- Epigenetic Reprogramming in Mammalian Development ↗ 2001 · 3,120 citations
- Genomic imprinting: parental influence on the genome ↗ 2001 · 2,302 citations
- Stability and flexibility of epigenetic gene regulation in mammalian development ↗ 2007 · 1,976 citations
- SC3: consensus clustering of single-cell RNA-seq data ↗ 2017 · 1,692 citations
Links
Research fields
Associated labs
Sources & review · profile last updated 2026-09-29
- https://www.altoslabs.com/team/wolf-reik 2026-09-23
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-74118-5 2026-09-23
- https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.280915.125 2026-09-23
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7ALpXoUAAAAJ 2026-09-23