Professor Kirsten Perrett is Group Leader of the Population Allergy Research Group and Deputy Directory of the Melbourne Children’s Trials Centre at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI). She is also Director of the National Allergy Centre of Excellence (NACE) and the Centre for Food & Allergy Research (CFAR), hosted at MCRI; Paediatric Allergist and Vaccinologist at The Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne and an Honorary Principal Fellow at The University of Melbourne.

For more than 15 years, Prof Perrett has spear-headed Investigator-led and industry-sponsored vaccine and food allergy clinical trials and is a highly sought-after trials expert and food allergy clinician scientist.

Awarded a 2022-26 National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator Award and 2018-2027 Melbourne Children’s Clinician-Scientist Fellowship, Prof Perrett has also received more than $44.3 million in competitive, government, philanthropic and industry research funding and has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, including 85 in the past five years. Her research has helped shape world-wide changes to food allergy prevention, diagnosis and management.

Prof Perrett’s PhD – at the Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford, UK – was on persistence of immunity and immunological memory to meningococcal vaccines. Her NHMRC funded post-doctoral fellowship explored maternal Immunisation at the Vaccine and Immunisation Research Group, MCRI. Additionally, Prof Perrett was a Visiting Scholar with the Stanford Lucille-Packard Children’s Hospital Vaccine Program at Stanford University, US, in 2013-2014.

Having two children with cow’s milk allergy, she moved her research focus in 2018 from testing strategies for prevention of infectious disease through vaccination to food allergy – one of the world’s leading health challenges. Her current program of clinical trials research focuses on investigating novel strategies for the prevention and early intervention/treatment of food allergy, eczema and atopic disease. She is also involved in research investigating immunological mechanisms underlying allergic disease pathogenesis and exploring strategies to improve the diagnostic accuracy of minimally invasive tests for food allergy diagnosis.

In 2022, the NACE launched thanks to a $10.2 million Federal Government investment. As Director and Allergy Research Hub Lead, Prof Perrett oversees the national plan of action to facilitate and accelerate research across drug, food, insect, and respiratory allergic disease. As Director and a Chief Investigator of the third continuous five-year term of the NHMRC funded CFAR – launched in 2012 – Prof Perrett has helped the Centre of Research Excellence (CRE) establish, and ensure Australia continues to be a global leader in food allergy research.