Rate My Professor Dawn Elder

Emeritus Professor Dawn Elder is a distinguished paediatrician and academic at the University of Otago, Wellington, in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health. She earned her MB ChB from the University of Otago Medical School in 1980, followed by a Diploma in Child Health (DCH), Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP), and a PhD in 2010 on respiratory variability in infants and children. Her paediatric training spanned the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, including advanced training in neonatal medicine in Perth, Western Australia, where she received the Lady King scholarship and conducted SIDS-related research using a piglet model at the University of Otago, Dunedin. Joining the Wellington department in 1995, she served as a neonatal specialist at Wellington Hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit until 2004. Transitioning due to burnout, she retrained and qualified as a paediatric sleep medicine specialist in 2008, developing the paediatric sleep service at Wellington Hospital, including CPAP for obstructive sleep apnoea. She held clinical roles with Capital & Coast Health (now Te Whatu Ora), specializing in child protection and child sexual abuse assessments, and served as an expert witness in high-profile cases, such as the Peter Ellis appeal. As Head of Department and Deputy Dean until May 2023, she continued locum work in sleep medicine until July 2023 before assuming emeritus status.

Professor Elder's research centers on sleep and breathing disorders, from preterm neonates to older children, encompassing cardiorespiratory stability, intermittent hypoxia, SUDI, family violence in infant deaths, and infant stress during procedures. She is a co-investigator on the national SUDI case-control study led by Professor Ed Mitchell and has supervised PhD theses, including those on empathic attunement in painful procedures and oximetry-measured hypoxia. Key publications include Elder et al. (2025) on family violence in the New Zealand SUDI study in Acta Paediatrica; her 2025 article on the Otago Medical School's 150 years in the New Zealand Medical Journal; Haszard et al. (2024) on sleep loss and dietary intake in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity; and Galland et al. (2024) on predictors of optimal sleep in Sleep Health. Awards include the 2021 Senior Leadership Award at the Wellington campus staff awards and Distinguished Service Awards from the Sleep Apnoea Association of New Zealand and the New Zealand branch of the Australasian Sleep Association. She chairs the Otago Medical School 150th anniversary committee and teaches child protection and sleep medicine to medical students and trainees.