About Us

Megan Sykes, M.D.

Dr. Sykes is the Harold and Ellen Danser Professor of Surgery and Professor of Medicine (Immunology) at Harvard Medical School. She heads the Bone Marrow Transplantation Section and is Associate Director of the Transplantation Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital Dr. Sykes was born in Toronto in 1958, earned her medical degree at the University of Toronto in 1982, then completed a residency in Internal Medicine in Montreal and Toronto. Dr. Sykes received research training in transplantation immunology at the National Institutes of Health. She moved to the MGH in 1990 to establish her laboratory in the newly-established Transplantation Biology Research Center. Dr. Sykes has made numerous seminal contributions to the transplantation field and has published 290 scientific journal articles and book chapters. One major aspect of her work has been aimed at making bone marrow transplantation safer, applicable to mismatched donor-recipient pairs, and more effective at eradicating cancer. Her basic research in this area has led to new, successful clnical approaches.  A second goal has been to make bone marrow transplantation safe enough to be used to achieve tolerance for organ grafts in people who don’t have cancer. Her efforts in developing such approaches and understanding how they work have resulted in new clinical initiatives in this area. Her third area of leadership has been in the induction of tolerance to xenografts, in order to make the use of non-human organ donors more successful. Dr. Sykes is a Councilor of The Transplantation Society and currently serves as President of the International Xenotransplantation Association. She has served in leadership roles in the planning of major international meetings on transplantation and immunology, and as an editor on several important journals in both fields. She is currently a Member of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Advisory Council, served on the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Panel on Xenotransplantation and is a trustee of the Roche Organ Transplant Research Foundation. In 1991, Dr. Sykes was awarded an American Cancer Society Junior Faculty Research Award, and in 1998 she received the Wyeth-Ayerst Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Transplant Physicians.