School of Biomedical Sciences is pleased to invite you to join the following seminar:

Date: Thursday, 9 June, 2022

Time: 4:00 pm – 5:30 am

Via Zoom:  https://hku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcpc-CvqjMqGdVpJOMrDZQYenClSFse446v

Meeting ID: 934 4974 8031

Password: 057365

Speaker: Professor Melissa Little, CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW), Executive Director of reNEW, Copenhagen; Chief Scientist at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI); MCRI Group leader of the Kidney Regeneration Laboratory, Melbourne, Australia; President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research; Honorary Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, University of Melbourne, Australia

Title: “Rebuilding the kidney using pluripotent stem cells”

Biography

Professor Melissa Little, BSc (Hons I), PhD, GAICD, FAAHMS, FAAS, is CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW), Executive Director of reNEW Copenhagen, Chief Scientist at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and leader of the Kidney Regeneration Laboratory, Melbourne, Australia where she holds an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow.   Melissa is currently President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research and holds an honorary position as Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, University of Melbourne.

Internationally recognised for her work on kidney development and her pioneering studies into potential regenerative therapies in the kidney, Professor Little’s approach to generating kidney organoids from human pluripotent stem cells has been adopted across the globe where it is being applied to disease modelling, drug screening and renal replacement therapies. Founded on more than 30 years of fundamental developmental biology, her stem cell research illustrates the capacity for understanding to be applied to product development. Professor Little’s work has been recognised by many awards, including the GlaxoSmithKline Award for Research Excellence (2005), an Eisenhower Fellowship (2006), a Boorhaave Professorship (2015) and Honorary Doctorate (2019), Leiden University, the Eureka Prize (2016), the Alfred Newton Richards Award from the International Society for Nephrology (2018) for her kidney organoid research, the Julian Wells Medal (2020) for her contribution to understanding of genetic basis of kidney development and the Homer W. Smith Award (2021) for her outstanding contributions that fundamentally affect the science of nephrology.

Melissa is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, and Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Society for Nephrology and is on the editorial board of the Cell Stem Cell, Nature Reviews Nephrology, Development and Kidney International. Melissa has previously held the role of President of the Australasian Society for Stem Cell Research, Program Leader of Stem Cells Australia, and the Chief Scientific Officer of the Australian Stem Cell Centre.

ALL ARE WELCOME

Should you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact Miss Angela Wong at 3917 9216.