Mary Elizabeth Sutherland is currently a graduate student at McGill University, where she works with Dr. Robert Zatorre, investigating the anatomical correlates of music and linguistic learning. She began playing harp at the age of 8, attending the Manhattan School of Music Precollege and Boston University Tanglewood Institute as well as taking private lessons. She completed her undergraduate degree at Cornell University with a degree in both music cognition (an independent major that combined music, physics, and perceptual psychology) and music performance. After a year in Germany working at the Institute for Music Physiology and Musician's Medicine in Hannover, she moved to Montreal to begin working towards her PhD.

She is the harpist with I Medici di McGill Orchestra and the soloist in Handels's Concerto for harp and orchestra in F at the concert - March 23, 2009.