Dr. Erin Heinzen was promoted to Professor with tenure in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics and the Department of Genetics, effective November 14, 2025.
Dr. Heinzen received her PharmD (2001) and PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences (2004) from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Dr. Heinzen completed postdoctoral fellowships at the UNC School of Medicine Curriculum in Toxicology (2004-05) and the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy (2005-09). She served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine and Center for Human Genome Variation at Duke University Medical Center (2009-14) and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology and the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center (2014-19). In January 2020, she was appointed as an Associate Professor without tenure in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics with a joint appointment in the UNC School of Medicine Department of Genetics; she was conferred permanent tenure at the rank of Associate Professor in January 2024. Her translational research program uses a multifaceted approach to establish the genetic and genomic bases of epilepsy, with the long-term goal to translate gene discoveries in epilepsy into novel therapeutic approaches. Her research contributions fall into two main categories: (1) gene discovery in epilepsy and (2) translating epilepsy genes into novel treatments.