Rate My Professor Yvonne Anderson

Professor Yvonne Anderson, BSc, MBChB, Dip Paeds, FRACP, PhD, is a paediatrician with over 25 years of clinical experience and a prominent leader in child health at Curtin University in the Faculty of Health Sciences. She earned her BSc in Psychology in 1996 and MBChB in 2000 from the University of Otago, followed by Dip Paeds, FRACP fellowship, and a PhD from the University of Auckland in 2018. Her career includes serving as a Consultant Paediatrician at Taranaki District Health Board for over a decade and holding senior academic positions at the University of Auckland as Honorary Associate Professor in Paediatrics, Child and Youth Health. In 2021, she relocated to Perth, Western Australia, to become Associate Professor of Community Child Health across Curtin University, Child and Adolescent Health Services, and Telethon Kids Institute. She now serves as Interim Dean and Head of Curtin Medical School and Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health.

Anderson's research specializations encompass community child health, paediatric endocrinology, diabetes, obesity interventions, health systems change, and health inequity. She pioneered the Whānau Pakari program, a multidisciplinary community-based healthy lifestyle intervention for children and adolescents with weight issues, which formed the basis of her PhD thesis, "Whānau Pakari: a multi-disciplinary intervention for children and adolescents with weight issues" (2018), awarded the University of Auckland Vice-Chancellor’s Best Doctoral Thesis Award. Notable publications include "A Novel Home-Based Intervention for Child and Adolescent Obesity: The Results of the Whānau Pakari Randomized Controlled Trial" (2017), "Two-year outcomes of Whānau Pakari, a multi-disciplinary assessment and intervention for children and adolescents with weight issues: A randomized clinical trial" (2020), and "A Multisource Process Evaluation of a Community-Based Healthy Lifestyle Programme for Child and Adolescent Obesity" (2024). Her contributions extend to leading pilots like the Healthy Lifestyle Program at Curtin and addressing COVID-19 related challenges in PPE reuse. Awards include the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship (2019), Child and Adolescent Health Service Aboriginal Health Champion (2024), and 2025 Telethon Grants. She chairs the Tamariki Pakari Child Health and Wellbeing Trust and engages in policy advocacy and international collaborations to enhance equitable child health outcomes.