Professor Douglas Hilton AO is the sixth director of Melbourne medical research institute Walter and Elizabeth Hall Insitute (WEHI), the inaugural head of the Brain Cancer Centre and the Lorenzo and Pamela Galli Chair in Medical Biology.

He grew up in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne attending Warrandyte Primary School, East Doncaster High School, completed a science degree at Monash University and moved to WEHI and The University of Melbourne to do research in 1986. Other than two years working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA, he has been a researcher at WEHI for the past 35 years and director since 2009.

As a medical researcher, he and his team focus on how cells are produced, how they function, and how they ‘talk’ to each other in healthy organs and in cancer. He is passionate about catalysing collaborations that take discoveries from the laboratory into hospital to provide hope to patients and drive improvements in disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

Douglas was appointed a Officer  of the Order of Australia (AO) in The Queen’s Birthday 2016 Honours List for distinguished service to medical research and education, particularly in the field of haematology, as a molecular biologist and author, to gender equity, and as a mentor of young scientists.