Cheryl is the Chief Scientist for the SGC Toronto laboratories, Professor of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute/Princess Margaret Cancer Center, and Canada Research Chair in Structural Genomics. 

Cheryl obtained her PhD in chemistry at the University of Toronto and did postdoctoral training at Stanford in protein structural biology using NMR spectroscopy. Cheryl has studied the structure and function of transcription regulatory proteins such as the tumor suppressor, p53, and its regulators.  A long time collaborator of Aled Edwards (SGC Director), the pair teamed up in the late 1990’s to develop structural biology methods for genome-scale research -  a concept that grew into the field of Structural Genomics.

Her current research interests focus on structural and chemical biology of epigenetic signaling, especially methylation dependent chromatin signaling. She coordinates the SGC’s structure-guided epigenetic chemical probe program and collaborates with numerous groups to use chemical probes to better understand epigenetic vulnerabilities in cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, and how to harness this knowledge for new therapies.