Rate My Professor Rob Griffiths

Associate Professor Rob Griffiths serves as Director of the Occupational and Aviation Medicine Unit within the Department of Medicine at the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand. He earned his MBChB with Honors and the Gold Medal from the University of Bristol in 1978. His extensive qualifications include FAFPHM (RACP, Sydney, 1985), FFOM (RCP, London, 1986), FAFOEM (RACP, Sydney, 1987), FFOM(I) (RACPI, Dublin, 2009), MACOEM (ACOEM, USA, 2009), MPP (Victoria University of Wellington, 1994), DipAvMed (University of London, 1983), and DIH (Society of Apothecaries, London, 1984). Following medical training in Bristol and service in the Royal Air Force, Griffiths was appointed Chief Medical Officer at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport, where he founded the occupational and aviation medicine program in 1987. He also holds an academic teaching position in aviation medicine at the University of Manchester, UK.

Griffiths leads a virtual department comprising 18 academic staff across North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Australasia, delivering distance education and research supervision in aviation medicine, occupational medicine, and aeromedical retrieval and transport. This program, under his direction, has evolved into the world's premier civil aviation medicine distance teaching initiative, granting 900 degrees and graduating 640 students since inception. His research specializations include shift work, return to work strategies, distance education, cultural aspects of distance learning participation, aerospace medicine, airline cabin safety, cabin crew health, and transport accident investigation. He provides medical consultancy to the Transport Accident Investigation Commission, the Chief Coroner, and Airways New Zealand, while serving as Principal Clinical Adviser to the Accident Compensation Corporation. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to aerospace medicine education, development, and administration, Griffiths received the 2025 John Ernsting Award from the Aerospace Medical Association. Notable publications co-authored by him include "The Occupational Health and Safety of Flight Attendants" (2012) and "Duty of Notification and Aviation Safety—A Study of Fatal Aviation Accidents in the United Kingdom" (2018).