Rate My Professor Lynette Sadleir

Professor Lynette Sadleir is a Professor in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, Faculty of Medicine. She holds degrees MBChB, MD, DipPaed, and FRACP. Sadleir joined the department in 1999 after completing an Epilepsy Fellowship at British Columbia Children's Hospital. In 2000, she commenced a joint clinical-academic appointment as a paediatric neurologist with Capital & Coast District Health Board, where she diagnoses and manages children with epilepsy and reports paediatric electroencephalograms for the Wellington Region. She has an active teaching role in epilepsy for undergraduate, postgraduate, and paediatric fellow trainees. As a physician scientist with expertise in epilepsy phenotyping, she is the director of the Epilepsy Research Group at the University of Otago, Wellington, which she founded in 2007. The group researches clinical and genetic aspects of epilepsy to better describe syndromes, identify causative genes, and improve quality of life for individuals with epilepsy and their families.

Sadleir served on the International League Against Epilepsy Classification Commission Task Force from 2010 to 2013, contributing to the ILAE online diagnostic manual of the epilepsies. She was president of the New Zealand League Against Epilepsy from 2013 to 2019 and now serves as treasurer. She chairs the ILAE Budget Review Committee and is a member of the ILAE Clinical Genetic Testing in the Epilepsies Task Force and the SNOMED Task Force. Additionally, she is a member of the Ministry of Health Complex Epilepsy Improvement Technical Advisory Group and the Paediatric Society's Neurology Clinical Network Clinical Reference Group, co-leading the development of New Zealand Epilepsy Guidelines and Pathways for Children and Young People. Her influential publications include 'Targeted resequencing in epileptic encephalopathies identifies de novo mutations in CHD2 and SYNGAP1' (Nature Genetics, 2013), 'The spectrum of SCN1A-related infantile epileptic encephalopathies' (Brain, 2007), 'ILAE definition of the idiopathic generalized epilepsy syndromes: position statement by the ILAE task force on nosology and definitions' (Epilepsia, 2022), and 'High rate of recurrent de novo mutations in developmental and epileptic encephalopathies' (American Journal of Human Genetics, 2017). In 2019, she presented her Inaugural Professorial Lecture entitled 'Epilepsy: Teams, genes and dreams'.