Hospital for Sick Children
Tarini Gunawardena, Ph.D.
Laboratory Research Project Manager, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.
Dr. Gunawardena completed her higher studies in Sri Lanka, obtained her Bachelors and Masters in Biotechnology from the Bangalore University, India and the University of Leeds, UK respectively. Her PhD was completed in the field of Stem Cell Biology at the University of Malaya, Malaysia. Following her PhD, she has been working on Cystic Fibrosis (CF) at the Hospital for Sick Children under the mentorship of Dr. Christine Bear and Dr. Theo Moraes with her work primarily centered around the Primary Nasal Epithelial Culture model.
Dr. Gunawardena is also the Project Manager for the CFIT Program (Program for individualized cystic fibrosis therapy), a program supported by CF Canada and the Hospital for Sick Children. This program involves recruiting individuals with CF, carrying out longitudinal studies on the effects of modulators for these individuals, bio banking patient specific tissues and making it available for other researchers who wish to utilize this resource. In addition, with the CFIT program Dr. Gunawardena is also involved in multi-centre studies with aims in employing in-vitro platforms to predict individual patient specific responses to CF modulators. With the CFIT centre at the Hospital for Sick Children she is also helping to advance the development of a program in Sri Lanka for the CF clinical care and therapy.
Dr. Gunawardena is also interested in identifying the differential expression of cell populations in the human nasal epithelia and understanding the role of these different cell types in influencing CFTR function. At the NACFC 2024 she is focussing on the work that is carried out by Dr. Christine Bear’s and Dr. Lu-Yang Wang’s teams related to CFTR channel regulation in single cells employing the fluorescence-based membrane potential assay and patch clamp studies.
Thursday, September 26, 2024
10:15 AM – 12:15 PM ET