Academic Position: Anette Melk is Professor of Pediatrics and Interdisciplinary Transplan-tation at Hannover Medical School (MHH), where she also serves as Dean for Academic Ca-reer Development. As pediatric nephrologist and clinician scientist, holding an MD and PhD, she represents a role model for combining an academic with a clinical career. Dr. Melk’s work on pathways leading to impaired regeneration in the pathogenesis of renal and cardi-ovascular diseases includes basic findings and concepts from cell and animal models to clin-ical applications. She has pioneered the idea that cellular senescence is crucial for the insuf-ficient regenerative capacity of donor organs and an important target in therapeutic ap-proaches. Her clinical research projects aim to further decipher factors leading to cardio-vascular and renal comorbidity in transplant recipients. She directs a major interventional trial, the SOPHOCLES trial funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her holistic view on optimization of patient and graft survival led her build the first research consorti-um that deals with sex- and gender-related differences in kidney transplantation with the idea to significantly influence health policy development.
Anette Melk is a pioneer in developing structured clinician scientist programs in Germany. Since 2008, she has designed and led programs that provide continuous support for aca-demic career development, including the DFG-funded PRACTIS program and the advanced clinician scientist program AVIATOR, funded by the Federal Ministry for Research (BMFTR). She is member of several national and international advisory boards for clinician scientists and leads the mentoring program from the International Pediatric Transplanta-tion Association. She is actively involved in best practice for clinician scientist training for the German Medical Faculties Association (MFT) and the DFG. Therefore, she brings a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing clinical academics: balancing clini-cal and research demands, identifying needs for training, ensuring diversity across disci-plines, and creating sustainable career pathways in translational medicine. Continuously, she develops and advances novel career pathways, e.g. to address the need for training in digital medicine or to promote underrepresented minorities. She shares her insights inter-nationally, for example as leading author of the Nature Medicine article “How to train the next generation of clinician scientists.”
Her commitment to structured career pathways for clinician scientists, mentoring, interna-tional collaboration fostering excellence in research and clinics is directly relevant to this workshop, which aims to explore new ways of strengthening clinical academic training and mobility between Scotland and Lower Saxony.
