Linda was an undergraduate at Leiden University in the Netherlands and obtained her PhD from Oxford before becoming a postdoctoral scientist at the MRC-Laboratory of Microbiology in Cambridge. At the LMB she pioneered key technologies in gigabase-scale genome synthesis.  Specifically, her research showed it was possible to move human chromosomes from human cells into ‘assembly cells’ where the human chromosome was present as a single copy. It could therefore be uniquely operated on to replace its human DNA with synthetic DNA.  The modified human chromosome could then be moved from assembly cells back to human cells, where the corresponding endogenous human chromosome was eliminated to generate human cells with one specifically modified chromosome.  

Her research at GBI builds on this work to further develop modified human chromosomes that will transform our ability to engineer genomes across species, with broad implications for how we understand and manipulate heredity.