Heidi Howard received her undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Biology from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) where she trained with Dr. Kurt Sittmann and Dr. Guy Rouleau respectively. The focus of her Ph.D. was neurogenetics and it culminated in the cloning of the gene for ACCPN. As a CIHR and Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellow she then continued her training in psychiatric genetics at the Centre for Genomic Regulation with Dr. Xavier Estivill (Barcelona, Spain) and at the Douglas Hospital with Drs. Ridha Joober and Howard Steiger (Montreal, Canada). With an Erasmus Mundus fellowship, she completed the Erasmus Mundus Master of Bioethics programme in 2008 and has had the opportunity to work at the Centre de recherche en droit public (Montreal, Canada) with Dr. Denise Avard on ethical aspects of pharmacogenomics research. As the recipient of a Marie Curie award (2009-2011) she will pursue her training in bioethics with Dr. Herman Nys and Dr. Pascal Borry at the K.U.Leuven. Her main areas of interest are public health genetics, personalized medicine, direct-to-consumer genetic testing services and genetics education.