Professor Marla B. Sokolowski

Marla Sokolowski (BSc 1977 UC) is an internationally renowned geneticist whose multidisciplinary analyses of gene-environment interactions have refuted longstanding ideas around genetic determinism. Sokolowski has contributed to a major paradigm shift through the appreciation that genomes of organisms and their gene expression is dynamic, thereby refuting centuries-old determinist thinking that DNA acts solely as a generic blueprint. Sokolowski has received several accolades for her groundbreaking work: Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1998), Royal Society of Canada Flavelle Medal for Biological Sciences (2020), Genetics Society of Canada’s Award of Excellence (2007), Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (2013), JJ Berry Smith Doctoral Supervision Award from the U of T (2022), amongst many others.