Associate Professor Valerie Sung

Team Leader and NHMRC Early Career Researcher

A/Prof Valerie Sung is a consultant paediatrician at The Royal Children's Hospital, Team Leader and NHMRC Early Career Researcher at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, and Honorary Clinical Associate Professor of the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne. Her career vision is to provide the best care to deaf and hard of hearing children as well as families of crying infants, while conducting clinical and population-based research that can change and optimize practice. She is passionate about using ethically-sound and consumer-accepted ways to enable use of (i) routine clinical and health services data for quality improvement and research, and (ii) large-scale registries as a platform to answer important research questions and facilitate intervention trials in real time.

Her research program on child deafness has a unique health services framework that encompasses population and clinical cohorts as well as intervention trials. A/Prof Sung’s major research projects include:

The Australian National Child Hearing Outcomes Registry (ANCHOR), in collaboration with Queensland Health, aiming to develop a national data platform to track outcomes and minimise inequities in child hearing health service access;
The Screen cCMV Project, in collaboration with Australia’s largest birth cohort GenV (Generation Victoria) , to implement timely screening of congenital CMV, a potentially reversible cause of progressive hearing loss; and
The Victorian Childhood Hearing Longitudinal Databank (VicCHILD), in collaboration with the Victorian Infant Hearing Screening Program (VIHSP), which has >1100 participant families since its inception in 2012.

A/Prof Sung is founder and chair of the Childhood Hearing Australasian Medical Professionals (CHAMP) Network which developed national guidelines for managing childhood hearing loss. She is a committee member of the Australian Newborn Hearing Screening Committee, member of the Expert Universal Newborn Hearing Screening Working Group, member of the AIHW Aboriginal Ear and Hearing Health Advisory Group, editorial panel member of BMC Pediatrics and past editorial panel member of the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health and Frontiers in Pediatrics, member of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians Paediatric Research Committee, member of the MCRI Community and Clinical Research Advisory Committee, Steering Committee Member of the Children's Healthcare Australasia development of the CHA Paediatric Patient Reported Experience Measure, and past member of the Australasian Paediatric Research Network Steering Committee.

Affiliations

Team Leader, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, 2021 – present
NHMRC Early Career Researcher, 2025-2029
Clinician Scientist Fellow, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, 2021 – 2024
Honorary Clinical Associate Professor, University of Melbourne, Department of Paediatrics, 2020 – present
Senior Research Officer, Murdoch Children's Research Institute, 2018 - present