Rate My Professor Mele Taumoepeau

Dr Mele Taumoepeau earned her PhD in Psychology from the University of Otago in 2006, supervised by Professor Ted Ruffman, with a thesis entitled 'Stepping stones to others’ minds: the relation between maternal mental and non-mental state language and children's language development'. Prior to her doctorate, she studied Psychology and Linguistics at Victoria University and obtained a degree in speech pathology and therapy in Edinburgh, Scotland. She worked for five years as a speech and language therapist, mainly with children, and received a Health Research Council Pacific postgraduate fellowship during her PhD studies.

Following her PhD, Dr Taumoepeau was a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago before taking up a lecturing position. She advanced to Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor, serving from 2011 to 2022. She developed the role of Department Adviser for Pacific Students, offering pastoral care and academic support. In 2016, she became the inaugural Associate Dean (Pacific) in the Division of Sciences and chaired the Pacific Health Research Committee of the Health Research Council of New Zealand. She was awarded a Marsden Fund Grant. Her research examines preschool children's socio-emotional development, parent-child conversations about mental states and their relation to children's social understanding, cross-cultural differences in talk about the mind, child language development, and the impact of ethnicity and culture on children's social understanding. Notable publications include 'Mother and infant talk about mental states relates to desire language and emotion understanding' (Child Development, 2006), 'Stepping stones to others’ minds: Maternal talk relates to child mental state language and emotion understanding at 15, 24, and 33 months' (Child Development, 2008), and 'Coaching in maternal reminiscing with preschoolers leads to elaborative and coherent personal narratives in early adolescence' (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2020). Her scholarship has over 3,000 citations.