Rate My Professor Gillian Whalley

Professor Gillian Whalley serves as Professor of Clinical Sonography / Cardiology in the Department of Medicine at the Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, within the Faculty of Medicine. She holds the qualifications BAppSc, MHSc (Hons), DMU, and PhD, with her doctoral research from the University of Auckland focusing on the role of contemporary echocardiography in heart failure management. Her career emphasizes clinical echocardiography practice, sonography teaching, and research into cardiovascular disease. Whalley maintains a clinical role in echocardiography and teaches courses such as ELM3 Early Professional Experience in Sonography. Over the past two decades, her work has centered on ultrasound screening for rheumatic heart disease in vulnerable populations, including Māori communities on New Zealand's East Coast, where she identified elevated cardiovascular disease rates. She has collaborated internationally on early detection of rheumatic heart disease in remote indigenous communities in Australia’s Northern Territory and Timor-Leste, training local health workers in portable ultrasound techniques. One such collaboration produced a top research article in the Medical Journal of Australia.

Whalley’s research specializations include the appropriate use of echocardiography for risk identification in patients and at-risk groups, community-based ultrasound screening for cardiovascular disease prevention, the interplay of body composition, ethnicity, and heart size, and establishing New Zealand-specific cardiac reference ranges that account for ethnic variations among Māori, Pacific, and other populations. She has screened approximately 900 New Zealanders to develop these ranges, highlighting how North American standards may misclassify larger hearts in Māori and Pacific individuals. Her expertise spans small single-centre trials, large multi-centre studies, cohort analyses, prognostic evaluations, and meta-analyses linking echocardiographic measures to clinical prognosis. As Principal Investigator with HeartOtago, she focuses on cardiovascular risk factors, epidemiology, and public health. Whalley recently completed a Health Research Council-funded study on heart size in Aotearoa/New Zealand and serves as Editor in Chief of the Australasian Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. Key publications include 'Fatigue is a key contributor to quality of life in heart valve disease and after valve replacement/repair: A qualitative study' (2026, Heart, Lung & Circulation), 'The semantic differential questionnaire format warrants consideration for use in healthcare settings' (2026, Quality of Life Research), 'Rationale for and design of the REsolution of LEft VENTricular thrombus (RELEVENT) Trial' (2026, American Heart Journal), and 'Application of the New 2023 World Heart Federation criteria to rheumatic heart disease' (2026, Pediatric Cardiology).