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photo-of-Lynette-Sadleir MBChB MD DipPaed FRACP
Professor in the Department of Paediatrics

Professor Lynette Sadleir joined the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health in 1999 following the completion of an Epilepsy Fellowship at British Columbia's Children's Hospital.

In 2000 she commenced the clinical part of her joint clinical-academic appointment as a paediatric neurologist with CCDHB. In her clinical role as a paediatric epileptologist, she diagnoses and manages children with epilepsy and reports paediatric electroencephalograms for the Wellington Region.

She has an active teaching role and is passionate about increasing the epilepsy knowledge of undergraduate, postgraduate and Paediatric fellow trainees. She was a member of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) Classification Commission Task Force between 2010 and 2013 and as such part of the team that wrote and developed the ILAE cutting edge online diagnostic manual of the epilepsies https://www.epilepsydiagnosis.org/.

Professor Sadleir is a physician scientist with expertise in epilepsy phenotyping. She is the Director of the Epilepsy Research Group. The Epilepsy Research Group is committed to improving the quality of life for individuals with epilepsy and their families.

Professor Sadleir served as the president of the New Zealand League Against Epilepsy from 2013 to 2019 and is now the treasurer. She is a member of both the Ministry of Health Complex Epilepsy Improvement Technical Advisory Group and the Paediatric Society's Neurology Clinical Network Clinical Reference Group. In this capacity, she co-led the development of the New Zealand Epilepsy Guidelines and Pathways for Children and Young People. She is presently the chair of the International League Against Epilepsy Budget Review Committee and a member of both the International League Against Epilepsy Clinical Genetic Testing in the Epilepsies Task Force and the SNOMED Task Force.

Research areas

Professor  Sadleir founded the Epilepsy Research Group in 2007. The group undertakes research into the clinical and genetic aspects of epilepsy. The aim of the research is to better describe the epilepsies and identify the genes that cause them. The overall rationale is that by understanding the basic molecular mechanisms of the inherited epilepsies we will get a deeper understanding of the disorder, with implications for diagnosis, prognosis and development of new treatments.

Inaugural Professorial Lecture (IPL)

Professor Sadleir gave her Inaugural Professorial Lecture on 13 November, 2019 on 'Epilepsy: Teams, genes and dreams'.

Publications

Sleyp, Y., Valenzuela, I., Accogli, A., Ballon, K., Ben-Zeev, B., Berkovic, S., … Sadleir, L., … Peeters, H. (2023). De novo missense variants in the E3 ubiquitin ligase adaptor KLH20 causes a developmental disorder with intellectual disability, epilepsy and autism spectrum disorder. European Journal of Human Genetics, 31(Suppl. 1), (pp. 8-9). doi: 10.1038/s41431-023-01337-5

Bundalian, L., Su, Y.-Y., Chen, S., Velluva, A., Kirstein, A. S., Garten, A., … Epi25 Collaborative, including Sadleir, L. G. (2023). Epilepsies of presumed genetic etiology show enrichment of rare variants that occur in the general population. American Journal of Human Genetics, 110, 1110-1122. doi: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2023.06.004

International League Against Epilepsy Consortium on Complex Epilepsies, including Sadleir, L. G. (2023). GWAS meta-analysis of over 29,000 people with epilepsy identifies 26 risk loci and subtype-specific genetic architecture. Nature Genetics, 55, 1471-1482. doi: 10.1038/s41588-023-01485-w

Montanucci, L., Lewis-Smith, D., Collins, R. L., Niestroj, L.-M., Parthasarathy, S., Xian, J., … Epi25 Collaborative, including Sadleir, L. G., … Lal, D. (2023). Genome-wide identification and phenotypic characterization of seizure-associated copy number variations in 741,075 individuals. Nature Communications, 14, 4392. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-39539-6

Harris, R. V., Oliver, K. L., Perucca, P., Striano, P., Labate, A., Riva, A., … Sadleir, L. G., … Berkovic, S. F. (2023). Familial mesial temporal lobe epilepsy: Clinical spectrum and genetic evidence for a polygenic architecture. Annals of Neurology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1002/ana.26765

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