Professor Melissa Little, AC, is CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW) and Chief Scientist at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia. A leader in kidney development, she is internationally recognised for generating models of the human kidney from pluripotent stem cells. This method, which generates multicellular microtissues contain patterning and segmenting nephrons, has been applied to disease modelling, drug screening and tissue engineering.
Professor Little has received many awards, including the GlaxoSmithKline Award for Research Excellence (2005); an Eisenhower Fellowship (2006); Boorhaave Professor (2015); Eureka Prize (2016); Alfred Newton Richards Award from the International Society for Nephrology (2018); Julian Wells Medal (2020) and the Homer W. Smith Award from the American Society of Nephrology (2021) for outstanding contributions that fundamentally affect the science of nephrology.
Past President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research and the Australasian Society for Stem Cell Research, she is a Companion of the Order of Australia, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, Danish Royal Academy of Science and Letters and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization.
Professional position
- CEO, Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW), University Of Copenhagen
- Chief Scientist, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, The Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne
