Dr. Sonya MacParland, PhD, is the Research Institute Director and a senior scientist in the Ajmera Transplant Centre at Toronto General Hospital, scientific director of the Schwartz Reisman Liver Research Centre and a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in liver immunobiology. She is a Professor in the University of Toronto’s department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology and the department of Immunology. Her team developed the first transcriptomic map of the human liver in health (Nature Communications; 2018) and in the livers of patients with a rare liver disease, Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (Journal of Hepatology, 2024) as a platform to examine how immune dysregulation can be targeted to treat liver diseases. In collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, research partners at UHN, U of T, SickKids and patient partners, her research team are using advanced genomics, human models and an open science approach to test new targets to reprogram the fibrotic niche in PSC.