Associate Professor Louise Cheng is a recent ARC Future Fellow (2019-2022), and is a group leader at the Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology and the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Melbourne, and the Head of Stem Cell Growth Regulation Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. 

Associate Professor Cheng completed her PhD at Kings College London in 2006. For her postdoctoral training, she worked in the lab of Dr Alex Gould at the National Institute for Medical Research, on how nutrient signalling affects organ size control. She established her independent laboratory at Peter Mac in 2012. Her team utilises Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism to investigate 1) how fate is maintained in differentiated neurons to prevent dedifferentiation and tumour initiation, 2) how stem cells interact with their microenvironment, and 3) how tumours can grow at the expense of muscles and adipose tissue during cancer cachexia.