World-renowned autoimmune liver disease clinician-researcher, Dr. Gideon Hirschfield has been successfully recruited to the Toronto Centre for Liver Disease (TCLD) at UHN. Dr. Hirschfield is the inaugural Lily and Terry Horner Chair in Autoimmune Liver Disease Research at the TCLD, Toronto General Hospital and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Hirschfield has extensive clinical expertise in the management of complex liver disease, pre- and post-transplant, and is now leading the Autoimmune Liver Disease Program at TCLD with his colleague, Dr. Aliya Gulamhusein. This comprehensive program offers life-long care to patients with autoimmune hepatitis, primary biliary cholangitis, and primary sclerosing cholangitis, while advancing groundbreaking research.
“We are very pleased to have Gideon joining our team,” says Dr. Harry Janssen, Director of the TCLD. “This is an important recruitment for our growing program; filling a vital programmatic and leadership need and demonstrating the global prominence of the TCLD, which helps us to draw the best talent from around the world.”
As a clinician-scientist Dr. Hirschfield manages a broad platform of translational and trials based clinical science with the goal of advancing therapies for patients with inflammatory liver disease that prevent the need for transplantation. Dr. Hirschfield graduated from the Universities of Oxford (1994) and Cambridge (1996) and was awarded a PhD from the University of London (2006). Prior to holding his current position, he was Professor of Autoimmune Liver Disease at the University of Birmingham, and Transplant Hepatologist at University Hospitals Birmingham, UK, where he led services for autoimmune liver disease, pregnancy-associated liver disease, and Wilson disease.
Dr. Hirschfield is the recipient of many international awards and is a global key opinion leader in autoimmune liver disease. He has published over 200 papers, among which include publications as the lead author in the high-impact scientific journals New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet and Nature Genetics.