Our students

Owen (Te Rarawa), who is a General Paediatrician in Waitematā District Health Board, completed his Masters of Public Health on ‘Ethnic inequities in health: Have we made progress? Pertussis mortality and morbidity in New Zealand for Māori and non-Māori over the past century’. Owen has used the expertise gained from completing this thesis to engage in professional roles in which he advocates for improvements in immunisation delivery for tamariki Māori.

Sai completed her medical degree at the University of Otago and then worked clinically in New Zealand and Fiji. She is now working in public health in Fiji and completing her training as a public health medicine specialist with the New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine.

In her PhD, Sai is investigating access to healthcare, using acute respiratory infections as the example disease. Her thesis includes quantitative and qualitative methodological components applied to studies being conducted in Fiji, and with Pacific families in New Zealand.

When she completes her PhD, Sai intends to continue to work in both Fijian and New Zealand contexts’ focusing on improving access to quality healthcare for Pacific families.

Dr Rebecca Griffith is a general paediatrician who is recently completed her PhD entitled The prevention of adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in children born to diabetic mothers” with the Department of Paediatrics: Child and Youth Health, University of Auckland. During her PhD, Dr Griffith was supported by scholarships from the Health Research Council of New Zealand and New Zealand Diabetes Foundation.

Rebecca is the lead author on 4 publications from research that she did during her PhD published in high ranking journals including Archives of Disease in Childhood: Fetal and Neonatal Edition and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and has given oral presentations of her work at international conferences including Pediatric Academic Societies in the United States and the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand.

Dr Griffith completed her medical training in the UK, her specialist training in New Zealand, and is now working as a general paediatrician at Kids First, Middlemore Hospital.

Marisa completed her Bachelor of Nursing Degree at the Federal University of the State of Paraná in Brazil. Her clinical nursing roles were mostly in Cardiology at Auckland District Health Board and with older adults, general medicine, and general surgery in other organisations.

More recently, Marisa became a Research Nurse and subsequently a Research Nurse Coordinator in the Department of Critical Care & Medicine at Auckland District Health Board. In 2017 she joined the Department of Paediatrics: Child & Youth Health at the University of Auckland.

Marisa completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Business: Health Management and a Master of Health Management in the School of Population Health at the University of Auckland. In these postgraduate studies, she developed research subject expertise in consumer perspectives of health needs.

In her PhD, Marisa is determining whether vitamin D supplementation prevents recurrent acute respiratory infection health care visits in young children. Her methodological expertise is in the abstraction of data that enables information contained in health care records to be used to measure health outcomes.

Marisa intends for her research to improve the health of children and families who currently experience poorer health outcomes by increasing their access to high-quality healthcare. She is happy to share her learning with others with similar career pathways and interests.

Libby Haskell is a paediatric emergency nurse practitioner who has recently completed her PhD entitled “Improving the care for infants with bronchiolitis: using knowledge translation to close the evidence-practice gap” with the Department of Paediatrics: Child and Youth Health, University of Auckland. Her PhD was undertaken within the Paediatric Research in Emergency Departments International Collaborative (PREDICT) research network and supported by a two year Clinical Research Training Fellowship from the Health Research Council of New Zealand.

Libby is the lead author on six publications from her PhD research findings published in high-ranking journals including JAMA Pediatrics and BMC Health Services Research. She has given oral presentations of her work at international conferences including Pediatric Academic Societies in the United States, the European Society for Emergency Medicine in Czechoslovakia, National Health and Medical Research Council Research Translation in Australia, and locally at the College of Emergency Nurses New Zealand and the Paediatric Society of New Zealand. She was awarded the Academic Pediatric Research Award for the 2019 Best Abstract by a Student in the United States, the Health Services Research Association of Australia and New Zealand award for the 2021 Best Implementation Paper and the Paediatric Society of New Zealand New Investigator Award in 2019.

Libby completed her nursing training in Auckland and her Master of Nursing at the University of Auckland. She currently works as a nurse practitioner in the Children’s Emergency Department at Starship Hospital and as a senior research fellow in the Department of Paediatrics: Child and Youth, University of Auckland.