Rate My Professor Deirdre Brown

Associate Professor Deirdre Brown is a clinical psychologist and researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago. She completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in psychology and clinical psychology at the University of Otago, earning a BA, DipGrad, PgDipArts, PgDipClPs, and PhD under the supervision of Professor Margaret-Ellen Pipe in 2003. Following her doctorate, she held a Foundation for Research, Science and Technology postdoctoral fellowship at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the USA, collaborating with Professor Michael Lamb. She subsequently worked at the Department of Psychology, University of Lancaster, UK, with Professor Charlie Lewis. Upon returning to New Zealand, she served as a clinical psychologist in Paediatric Outpatients at Southern District Health Board in Dunedin. In 2009, she joined Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington as a lecturer, advancing to Senior Lecturer and then Associate Professor in 2019. Prior to her current role, she was Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Medicine, Dunedin School of Medicine.

Brown's academic interests center on child development, focusing on how children learn, remember, and report experiences, and the effects of adult questioning in contexts such as investigative interviews, medical settings, and classrooms. Key research areas include forensic interviewing with children, children's eyewitness testimony, reactions to and support needs following abuse disclosures, children's temporal language in recall, digital device use, sleep quality, and mental health in young people. She teaches PSYC 203 Abnormal Psychology and PSYC 435 Developmental Psychopathology. Brown belongs to the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists and the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Her achievements include a 2016 Teaching Excellence Award, membership in a 2024 Department of Psychological Medicine Teaching Award-winning Psychology Team, and a 2023 Marsden Fund grant of $859,000 for the project 'How adults talk to children about maltreatment: Identifying knowledge, gaps and challenges'. Notable publications comprise 'Tell Me What Happened: Questioning Children About Abuse' (2018), 'The NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol: An Analogue Study' (2013), 'Conversational Apprentices: Helping Children Become Competent Informants About Their Own Experiences' (2006), 'Children as Witnesses: Remembering, Reporting, and Reliability' (2025), and 'Tele-Forensic Interviewing to Elicit Children's Evidence: Benefits, Risks, and Practical Considerations' (2021).