Marnie Blewitt completed her PhD with Prof. Emma Whitelaw at The University of Sydney, developing a sensitised mutagenesis screen for novel epigenetic modifiers in the mouse, for which she was awarded the Genetics Society of Australia DG Catcheside prize. Marnie took up a Peter Doherty Post-doctoral fellowship with Prof. Douglas Hilton at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. In her post-doctoral studies, she continued to work on the novel protein Smchd1 that she identified in her PhD, analysed its critical role in X inactivation, and studied the role of polycomb group proteins in hematopoietic stem cell function. This work earned her the AAS Gani medal and the L’Oreal Australia Women in Science fellowship 2009. In 2010, Marnie established her own group at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute as an ARC QEII fellow, working on the molecular mechanisms of epigenetic control in haematopoietic stem cells, neural stem cells and in X chromosome inactivation.