St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton, AstraZeneca Canada, and McMaster University announced that Dr. Manali Mukherjee has been named the AstraZeneca Chair in Respiratory Diseases. An expert in the investigation of inflammatory mechanisms of chronic respiratory diseases, Dr. Mukherjee's work is focused on autoimmunity, response to treatment, and the development and validation of clinical biomarkers.

Her lab is situated within the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health (FIRH) at St. Joe's. The endowed chair was established in 2004 by McMaster University and AstraZeneca Canada. It was first held by Dr. Malcolm Sears while he was the research director at the FIRH.

Dr. Mukherjee's five-year appointment began in late 2023. Dr. Mukherjee earned her PhD in cell biology in 2012 at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. She went on to complete a six-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health working under the supervision of Professor Parameswaran Nair, one of the world's leading experts on severe asthma and airway eosinophilia.

Throughout her extensive work, she has identified the presence of localized autoimmune responses in the airways of patients with complex airway disease and determined their pathogenic role in driving disease severity. More recently, Dr. Mukherjee and her research team identified autoimmune responses in acute-severe COVID-19 and linked autoimmunity with post-acute COVID-19 sequelae (Long COVID). Dr. Mukherjee is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine (Division of Respirology) at McMaster University and an affiliate scientist at The Research Institute of St.

Joe'sHamilton. She is also an associate member of the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, as well as the McMaster Immunology Research Centre.