A/Prof Valerie Sung is a consultant paediatrician at The Royal Children's Hospital, Team Leader and Senior Research Fellow 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.

Her research program on child hearing loss has a unique health services framework that encompasses population and clinical cohorts as well as intervention trials. A/Prof Sung’s research focuses on 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. Specifically, A/Prof Sung’s research aims to (i) identify early predictors of child outcomes for precision medicine and improve early prognostic counselling, (ii) establish evidence-based management through interventional trials, and (iii) discover ways to prevent or reduce adverse challenges faced by deaf and hard of hearing children and their families. Her hearing research program has also been recognised by a 2019 L'Oréal-UNESCO Australia For Women in Science Fellowship.

A/Prof Sung’s major research projects include: (i) The Australian National Child Hearing Outcomes Registry (ANCHOR), in collaboration with Queensland Health, aiming to develop a national database/registry to track outcomes and minimise inequities in child hearing health service access; (ii) The Screen cCMV Project, in collaboration with Australia’s largest birth cohort GenV (Generation Victoria) and the Walter and Eliza Hall Research Insitute, to develop a point-of-care test for population screening of congenital CMV, a potentially reversible cause of progressive hearing loss; and (iii) 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, editorial panel member of the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 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 and Early Career Representative of the Kids to Adults (K2A) National Alliance.