Rate My Professor Karen Tustin

Dr. Karen Tustin is a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago. She earned her BA(Hons) and PhD in Psychology from the University of Otago in 2011, with her doctoral thesis titled Childhood Amnesia and Episodic Memory: A Developmental Perspective, supervised by Professor Harlene Hayne. Her PhD research examined the mechanisms of childhood amnesia—the inability to recall events from infancy and early childhood—and episodic memory development in young children. She developed new techniques for interviewing children about personal memories and coding schemes to assess the episodic nature of recollections. Notable publications from this period include Defining the Boundary: Age-Related Changes in Childhood Amnesia (Tustin & Hayne, 2010, Developmental Psychology) and Early Memories Come in Small Packages: Episodic Specificity... (Tustin, 2016).

Since 2011, Dr. Tustin has managed the Graduate Longitudinal Study New Zealand (GLSNZ) as a Research Fellow in the National Centre for Lifecourse Research, tracking university graduates' outcomes over 10 years in areas such as employment, career progression, health, wellbeing, and lifestyles. The study provides data on tertiary education's societal value, covering topics like Māori and Pacific equity, PhD student mental health, and student substance use norms. Concurrently, she holds a Research Fellow position in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, Faculty of Medicine, Dunedin, within the New Zealand Child and Youth Epidemiology Service. As Principal Investigator for the Cure Kids-funded annual State of Child Health in Aotearoa New Zealand report, she leads analyses on child health indicators. Key outputs include Kanorau ā-roro: Neurodevelopmental conditions in children and young people in Aotearoa (Tustin et al., 2025), child poverty monitors, injury reports, and chronic condition profiles, informing Ministry of Health policies and advocacy for youth wellbeing.