Professor Katie Allen is a paediatric gastroenterologist and allergist practising in the field of food allergy at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. Prof Allen received first class honours for her medical degree at Monash University and honours for a Bachelor of Medical Science degree undertaken at Cambridge University, UK. She subsequently spent two years as a Clinical Gastroenterology Fellow at the University of Chicago and then received a PhD from The University of Melbourne.
Professor Allen is Director of the Centre for Food & Allergy Research and Director of the Population Health Research Theme at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. She is chief investigator on 6 NHMRC-funded cohort studies which all seek to answer parts of the jigsaw with regards to population health and evolution of the new allergy epidemic. She supervises 6 PhD students and has published extensively with more than 210 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, of which she is first or senior author on the majority including The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. She is an NHMRC Practitioner Fellow and additionally Fellow of the Australia Academy of Health and Medical Science.
Professor Allen is the principal investigator of the HealthNuts study at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, which is the largest population-based study of food allergy in children ever mounted. Professor Allen has key leadership roles in several international consortiums including the Integrated Approaches to Food Allergen and Allergy Risk Management, Worldwide Universities Network, and International Inflammation Network. She is a founding member of the Australian Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Society of Australia and New Zealand and sits on the Clinical and Scientific Affairs Committee of the World Allergy Organisation and three committees of The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology of which she is also a Fellow.
Despite this she remains an active clinician in both the Department of Allergy and the Department of Gastroenterology at the RCH, Melbourne and has 4 children.