Professor Tarnow-Mordi is an academic neonatologist, who graduated with first class Honours in Cambridge and received neonatal training at The John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. He spent 13 years at Ninewells Hospital, University of Dundee as Senior Lecturer, then Reader, and moved to Sydney in 1999. Since moving to Australia he has held the inaugural Chair of Neonatology at Westmead Hospital and The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, University of Sydney, and has been Director of the Department of Neonatology at Westmead Hospital. He has an established reputation in clinical epidemiology and was the coordinator of the International Neonatal Network and led the team which originated the CRIB Score. He has a longstanding clinical epidemiological research interest in outcome prediction and comparison of quality of care in high-risk premature infants. He has been a consistently strong advocate of large multicentre studies, which answer questions of fundamental importance in neonatal medicine.
Professor Tarnow-Mordi’s ORACLE trials (I and II), which were designed and conducted in collaboration with Professor Sir Richard Peto and Professors Sara Kenyon and David Taylor, and took place between July 1994 and May 2000. These involved obstetricians and paediatricians from 161 centres in UK, Australia and 12 other countries in recruiting over 11,000 women. He was chief investigator of the ECSURF Study, which undertook a detailed cost analysis of 57 UK neonatal intensive care units, and the UK Neonatal Staffing Study, which recruited a prospective cohort of over 13,000 infants from 54 centres. He has been the recipient of over ₤4 million from UK grant bodies, the largest single grant being from the Medical Research Council for the ORACLE trials for ₤2.4 million. Since his move to Australia he has received over $20 million in grants from NHMRC and has been CIA on the INIS, BOOST II, APTS LIFT and LEAP1 trials, and a CI on the WOMBAT Collaboration Enabling Grant, all funded by NHMRC. He has over 150 publications in peer reviewed journals, e.g. the INIS trial of adjunctive IVIG therapy in 3,493 infants, (NEJM 2011;365: 1201-11) the BOOST II Australia trial in 1,135 infants (NEJM 2013;368:2094; NEJM2016; 374: 749-60) and TORPIDO1 in 292 infants (Pediatrics 2017 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2016-1452).