Sonya MacParland
PhD
Dr Sonya MacParland, PhD, is a Senior Scientist in the Ajmera Transplant Centre at UHN and an Associate Professor in the University of Toronto’s department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology and the department of Immunology.
Dr. MacParland holds a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Liver Immunobiology.
Dr MacParland's research program is focused on translating fundamental knowledge about the immune biology of the liver into clinical applications.
Dr MacParland and her research team are using advanced genomics including single cell RNA sequencing to describe the microenvironment of the healthy and diseased human liver.
Her team recently developed the first transcriptomic map of the human liver (Nature Communications; 2018) as a platform to examine how immune dysregulation drives liver diseases.
Her team is also examining how the liver immune environment can be therapeutically targeted and manipulated using nanoparticles to slow or reverse ongoing damage (Nature Materials; 2016, ACS Nano; 2017, ACS Nano 2020).