Jan studied biology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and obtained a M.Sc. by research in life sciences from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He joined the laboratory of Prof. William Earnshaw, also at Edinburgh University, where he received his Ph.D. in Cell- and Molecular Biology for his seminal work demonstrating the relationship between local chromatin state, non-coding transcription and the epigenetic inheritance of the centromere locus in mammalian cells. In 2010, Dr. Bergmann moved to New York as postdoctoral fellow in Prof. David Spector’s group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Here, he spear-headed next-generation sequencing and computational approaches to identify a series of long non-coding RNAs as developmental biomarkers and potential targets for antisense oligonucleotide therapeutics.