Assoc. Prof. David Elliott leads the Heart Disease Group at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute and he is a principal investigator of the Novo Nordisk Foundation for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW). David co-directs, with Assoc. Prof. Rachel Conyers, the Australian Cardio-Oncology Registry (ACOR), a national program targeted at improving long-term cardiac health outcomes for childhood cancer survivors. The focus of Assoc. Prof. Elliott’s laboratory is to develop pluripotent stem cell-based models of heart disease and use these models to find new therapies for heart disease. Throughout his career Assoc. Prof. Elliott has made important contributions to understanding the molecular control of heart muscle development, function and disease.

Assoc. Prof. David Elliott completed his PhD on the genetics of heart development at The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. He continued to post-doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge studying the nervous system in the fruit fly at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute. Assoc. Prof Elliott began using human pluripotent stem cells in a second post-doc with Profs. Andrew Elefanty and Ed Stanley at Monash University where he generated key stem cell lines and identified the first cardiac lineage cell surface markers.