Dr Heather Symons is an Associate Professor of Oncology and Pediatrics and the Clinical Director of Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplantation at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Her research focus has been utilising haploidentical donors for a variety of malignant and nonmalignant disorders. Improving the efficacy and availability of allogeneic BMT using haploidentical donors while decreasing its toxicity is a long term goal. As the principal investigator (PI), Heather completed the first national, multi-institutional trial using myeloablative HLA- haploidentical BMT (haploBMT) with post-transplantation cyclophosphamide for paediatric hematologic malignancies through the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Consortium (PBMTC). She is the PI of an Institutional trial of reduced intensity conditioning haploBMT for high risk solid tumours and a reduced intensity conditioning haploBMT for immunodeficiencies, immune dysregulatory syndromes and inherited bone marrow failure syndromes. Heather is a co-investigator on several other institutional and national BMTCTN trials utilising haploBMT for malignant and non-malignant disorders. She is on the steering Committee of the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) stem cell committee and is the PI of a phase 3 trial randomising paediatric patients with acute leukaemia to haploBMT versus matched unrelated donor BMT.