Dr. Megan Sykes, MD, is the Michael J. Friedlander Professor of Medicine and Professor of Microbiology & Immunology and Surgical Sciences (in Surgery), Columbia University. She is Director of the Columbia Center for Translational Immunology, Director of Research for the Transplant Initiative and Director of Bone Marrow Transplantation Research at Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Sykes’ research career, during which she has published >500 papers and book chapters, has focused on hematopoietic cell transplantation, organ allograft tolerance induction, xenotransplantation tolerance and Type 1 diabetes. She has developed novel strategies for achieving GVL effects without GVHD following hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT). One such approach provided safety and efficacy data in clinical trials of non-myeloablative haploidentical HCT that permitted the use of HCT for the intentional achievement of organ allograft tolerance in humans. Her work on xenogeneic thymic transplantation for tolerance induction has been extended into non-human primate and human studies. She has used mixed chimerism to reverse autoimmunity while replacing destroyed islets of Langerhans in Type 1 diabetes and developed novel “human immune system (HIS) mouse” models that allow personalized analysis of the pathogenesis of human immune disorders such as Type 1 diabetes. She has also used the HIS mouse model to gain an understanding of human T cell repertoire development and to assess the impact of stem cell-derived human thymic epithelial cells on human T cell development in a porcine thymus. Dr. Sykes is Past President of the International Xenotransplantation Association, was President of the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCiS) from 2022-2024, a recipient of the Medawar Prize and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.