Melissa Wake
Melissa Anne Wake is a New Zealand paediatrician and scientific director of the Generation Victoria initiative, which states the aim of creating very large, parallel whole-of-state birth and parent cohorts in Victoria, Australia, for Open Science discovery and interventional research. She is group leader of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute's Prevention Innovation Research Group and holds professorial positions with the University of Melbourne and the University of Auckland.
Her "population paediatrics" research spans common childhood conditions and antecedents of diseases of ageing. She leads the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children's biophysical repository and has led or co-led 20 community-based randomised trials. A major focus is on building large-scale platforms to support faster, better observational and interventional children's research.
Early life and education
Melissa Wake was born in Levin, New Zealand, the youngest of five children. After leaving Woodford House School for Girls in 1976, she graduated in medicine from the University of Otago in 1982, and entered clinical paediatrics in England before formal training in Auckland and Melbourne. Following her research doctorate, she was Director of Research at Melbourne's Centre for Community Child Health and a consultant paediatrician at Melbourne Royal Children's Hospital. In 2017, she took up the Chair in Child Health Research at the University of Auckland, later returning to Melbourne to lead the foundational stages of Generation Victoria.Awards
- 2008, 2016 NHMRC "Ten of the Best" publication
- 2009 Australian Health Minister's Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Research
- 2012 National Health and Medical Research Council – Excellence Award – Highest-ranked Research Fellowship