Alan Davidson

Head of the Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology, The University of Auckland

Professor Alan Davidson is head of the Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology in the School of Medical Sciences at The University of Auckland. He received a B.Sc (Hons) and a Ph.D from The University of Auckland. His post-doctoral training was underaken at Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA where he worked on blood stem cell formation. In 2005, Dr. Davidson started his own research programme at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. In 2011, he returned to The University of Auckland as the Rutherford Foundation Distinguished Fellow. Since this time he has established an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) programme that focuses on kidney disease and injury. He has developed a method to create kidney organoids (mini balls of kidney tissue) from iPSCs and is using these to model acute kidney injury, genetic renal diseases such as cystinosis and polycystic kidney disease, and to screen for new therapeutics.