Lisa Te Morenga

Lisa Anne Te Morenga (Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, Te Uri o Hua, Ngāpuhi and Te Rarawa) is a New Zealand Maori academic, and she is a full professor at the Research Centre for Hauora and Health at Massey University. Her research focuses on nutrition and Māori health, especially in relation to dietary interventions to prevent metabolic disease.

Early life and education
Te Morenga whakapapas to Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, Te Uri o Hua, Ngāpuhi and Te Rarawa.

Te Morenga began her science career with the New Zealand Institute of Forestry as a forestry science graduate at the University of Canterbury, before switching to studying human nutrition. Te Morenga completed a PhD titled The effects of altering macronutrient composition on diabetes risk at the University of Otago in 2010, supervised by Jim Mann, Sheila Williams and Rachel C. Brown.

Academic career
After completing her doctorate, Te Morenga joined the faculty of the University of Otago as part of the Edgar Diabetes and Obesity Research Centre. She then worked at Victoria University of Wellington, before moving to Massey University, rising to full professor in 2024.

Te Morenga's research focuses on how to prevent and treat obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease using dietary interventions. Her work has led to systematic reviews of the effect of sugar levels in the diet and also saturated fat intake and its effect on cardiometabolic disease in children. Her 2012 review of sugar intake in the British Medical Journal was hailed as "providing irrefutable evidence that sugar in the diet contributes to weight gain, resulting in changes to international nutrition policy".

Te Morenga is part of the Riddet Institute Centre of Research Excellence, and the Healthier Lives National Science Challenge, and the Health Coalition Aotearoa.

Honours and awards
In 2019 Te Morenga was awarded the Hamilton Award, which is the Royal Society Te Apārangi's Early Career Research Excellence Award for Science, for "her contribution to international evidence-based nutrition policy stemming from her research examining the impact of dietary sugars on body weight".

In 2021, Te Morenga gained a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship for a project named ‘Naku te rourou, nau te rourou, ka oranga ai te iwi (With my food basket and your food basket the people will be well)’. The project involves looking at the impact of eating different types of wholegrain foods on type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, in order improve the advice that dietitians can give people who have or are at risk of disease and to guide food manufacturers to improve products. Te Morenga will also look at sugar intake levels and investigate how those can be reduced, and work with Māori communities to design dietary interventions that are culturally appropriate.