Catherine Dulac is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. Her work explores neural circuits underlying instinctive social behaviors in mice, and the nature and function of genomic imprinting in the brain. She grew up in Montpellier, France, graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and received her PhD from the University of Paris VI. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and joined Harvard as a junior faculty. She was Chair of Harvard's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology from 2007 until 2013. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and of the French Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.