Lynley Anderson

Lynley Carol Anderson is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Otago, specialising in bioethics in health care education and sports and sports healthcare provision.

Academic career
Anderson completed a Master of Health Science with a thesis titled  Knowledge and power in the clinical setting at the University of Otago in 1998. She followed this with a PhD, also at Otago, titled Stress fractures: ethics and the provision of sports medicine at the elite level in New Zealand. Anderson then joined the faculty of the University of Otago, rising to associate professor in 2016 and full professor in 2022. Since 2017 Anderson has been the Head of the Bioethics Centre at the university. She has been chair of the Health Research Council Ethics Committee and the Ethics Committee for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

Anderson's research covers ethics in sports and sports health care. A 2019 paper by Anderson and colleagues Alison Heather and Taryn Knox examined the issue of transwomen in elite sport, and argued that transwomen had a physiological advantage over other women, and that the gender binary of sports should be changed to 'a more nuanced approach'. Anderson also researched the ethics of sending athletes to compete during a pandemic. Anderson is also interested in ethical issues faced by medical and healthcare students, and has written codes of ethics for the New Zealand Physiotherapy Board and the Sports Physiotherapy Special Interest Group. She was part of a team that developed an informed consent statement for the involvement of medical students in patient care, published in 2023.