NOTE: This event starts earlier than our usual seminars, at 3.30pm.

Distinguished Professor Dame Jane Harding has spent her career investigating how care for mothers and babies can be improved to improve lifelong health and wellbeing. She will describe examples of some of these research areas, including the importance of early nutrition, protective effects of antenatal corticosteroids before preterm birth, and management of high and low glucose levels in newborns. She will also provide some insights about how these advances came about, and the challenges and privileges of a career in academic medicine.

World leading neonatologist Distinguished Professor Harding obtained her medical degree at The University of Auckland. She then trained in fetal physiology on a Rhodes Scholarship, completing her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. After specialist training as a Paediatrician in New Zealand, she completed her FRACP in neonatology. Her postdoctoral training was as a Fogarty Fellow at the University of California at San Francisco.

Professor Harding was appointed to the faculty of The University of Auckland in 1989 and was appointed Professor of Neonatology in 1997. She was Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) for The University of Auckland from 2008-2015, and is a member of the LiFePATH research group of the University’s Liggins Institute.

Professor Harding’s research activities include clinical as well as basic physiological studies. Her main interests concern the interaction of nutrients and growth factors in the regulation of growth before and after birth, perinatal glucose regulation and the long-term consequences of treatments given around the time of birth.

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