Dr. Melena Bellin is a physician-scientist and tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology, and the Department of Surgery at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on cell therapy for patients with type 1 diabetes and surgical diabetes. She has been an innovator in the field of total pancreatectomy with islet autotransplantation (TPIAT), including leading 4 randomized clinical trials of novel therapies to improve islet engraftment after TPIAT, defining long-term outcomes after TPIAT, and developing TPIAT as an important therapy for children with hereditary pancreatitis. She has been an Investigator in multiple clinical trials of alloislet transplantation for type 1 diabetes, including the Clinical Islet Transplant Consortium studies, and in novel phase I/II studies of stem cell-derived islet products. She serves on the Executive Committee for the Clinical Islet Transplant Registry (CITR). She has over 130 peer-reviewed publications in the field, and funding from NIH including three R01 and two U01 awards as primary investigator.