Valerie is a paediatrician at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital and a Senior Research Fellow at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. She is director of the Caring for Hearing Impaired Children Clinic at the RCH. Her research program on childhood hearing loss has a health services framework that encompasses population and clinical cohorts as well as intervention trials. It aims to identify early predictors of child outcomes to improve early prognostic counselling, establish evidence-based management, and ultimately discover ways to prevent or reduce progression of hearing loss. She was awarded a L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship in 2019 for this work.
Valerie chairs the Childhood Hearing Australasian Medical Professionals (CHAMP) Network which developed national medical guidelines for managing childhood hearing loss. She is a committee member of the Australian Newborn Hearing Screening Committee, and editorial panel member of the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.