Laureate Professor Ingrid Scheffer
Ingrid E Scheffer AO, MBBS, FRACP, FAES, FAA, FRS, PresAHMS
Chair of Paediatric Neurology, Departments of Medicine and Paediatrics, The University of Melbourne, Austin Health and Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia; Director of Paediatrics, Austin Health, Melbourne; Honorary Senior Research Fellow, The Florey Institute of Neurosciences and Mental Health and Murdoch Children's Research Institute.
Laureate Professor Scheffer is a paediatric neurologist and epileptologist whose work together with Laureate Professor Sam Berkovic and molecular geneticists at the Women's and Children's Hospital in Adelaide, has led the field of epilepsy genetics research over the last 25 years. This collaboration resulted in identification of the first epilepsy gene and many more epilepsy genes. Professor Scheffer has described many novel epilepsy syndromes and continues to refine genotype-phenotype correlation. Professor Scheffer's research interests include genetics of epilepsy, epilepsy syndrome classification, and genetics of autism spectrum disorders and speech and language disorders. She led the first major revision of classification of the epilepsies in 28 years for the International League Against Epilepsy. She was awarded the 2007 American Epilepsy Society Clinical Research Recognition Award, the 2009 Eric Susman Prize from the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the L'Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science Laureate for the Asia-Pacific region for 2012. She was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2014, an inaugural Fellow and Vice-President of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences in 2014, and Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2018. Together with Prof Sam Berkovic, she was awarded the Australian Prime Minister's Prize for Science in 2014. She is currently President of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Science.