Alison McGuigan

Dr. Alison McGuigan is a Professor in Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at University of Toronto. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Materials Science from University of Oxford, her PhD in Chemical Engineering from University of Toronto and completed post-docs at Harvard University and Stanford School of Medicine.

Dr. McGuigan has made pioneering contributions to the engineering of tissue models to explore mechanisms of disease and regeneration. Dr. McGuigan has established strategies to generate multi-component tissue systems with specified organization. Furthermore, she has pioneered the design of tissue platforms for smart data acquisition, with a focus on stratifying heterogeneous bulk data by cell population, by spatial location, or by time. Her team have used these tools to identify previously unknown patterns of cell behaviour in multi-component tissues and to begin defining design rules that govern the assembly of individual cells into functional tissues.

Dr. McGuigan has published >110 papers, patents and abstracts and in recognition of her work has received numerous awards including the 2013 TERMIS-AM Young Investigator Award, the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering he Hatch Innovation Award, and in 2018 was elected to the Royal Society of Canada-College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

She serves on the executive leadership team of Medicine by Design (A Canadian First Excellence Research Fund program) and on the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM) incubation and outreach committee. She also serves on the editorial board of the journals “Cell Reports Methods” and “In Vitro Tissues”.