Katie Allen (politician)

Allen grew up in country Victoria before attending boarding school at Melbourne Girls Grammar.[2] Her father was born on Ocean Island in the British colony of Gilbert and Ellice Islands (present-day Kiribati). She held British citizenship by descent until March 2019 when she renounced it to run for parliament.[1]

Allen studied medicine at Monash University, also undertaking research at the University of Cambridge, and subsequently trained as a doctor at the Alfred Hospital.[2] She completed a Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne in 2002. Her doctoral thesis was on the use of liver cell transplantation to treat Wilson's disease.[3]

From 1998, Allen was employed as a paediatric allergist and gastroenterologist at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. She has held professorial rank at the University of Melbourne and University of Manchester, and in 2013 was appointed director of the Centre of Food and Allergy Research at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI).[4] Allen was the principal investigator for the MCRI's "HealthNuts" study, which is "the largest single-centre population based study of food allergy in children ever mounted". The study tracks 5,300 children who were diagnosed with food allergies as infants.[5]

Outside of her research, Allen has served as chair of the Melbourne Girls Grammar school council and as a director of Cabrini Health, a non-profit Catholic healthcare service.[2]

In 2015 Allen was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.[6]

Allen was the Liberal candidate in Prahran at the 2018 Victorian state election, losing to the incumbent Greens MP Sam Hibbins. In February 2019, she won preselection for the Division of Higgins, replacing the retiring MP Kelly O'Dwyer.[7] She retained the seat for the Liberals at the 2019 federal election despite suffering a six percent swing–enough to drop the Liberal majority to 53 percent, making Higgins a marginal seat for the first time. Notably, she was the first Liberal candidate in Higgins to come up short of a majority on the first count.[2]