Prof Robert Shepherd

Professor Robert Shepherd is the Director of the Bionic Ear Institute and a Professor of Medical Bionics in the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Melbourne.

He received his Ph.D. in Otolaryngology from the University of Melbourne. Prof Shepherd’s doctoral thesis examined the safety and efficacy of multichannel cochlear implants and contributed to Cochlear Ltd’s successful FDA approval for the clinical use of a multichannel cochlear implant. Prof Shepherd has held international research appointments throughout his career at the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center, University of Washington, Seattle, U.S.A.; Department of Physiology, J. -W. Goethe University, Frankfurt a. M., Germany and Boys Town National Institute for Communication Disorders in Children, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.A.

Prof Shepherd has been the Principal Investigator on more than $5.3M of research funding including grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He continues to work closely with industry through research links with Cochlear Ltd. and Living Cells Technologies Ltd.

Prof Anthony Burkitt

Director of Bionic Vision Australia, head of the Neuro -Engineering group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne and Assistant Director of the Bionic Ear Institute.

Prof. Burkitt’s research is in the area of neuro-engineering and he has worked in cochlear implant speech processing and computational auditory neuroscience for over a decade. This work has involved the investigation of various mechanisms of information processing specialised to the auditory system and associated with speech perception. He has published papers on physiological neural processing mechanisms associated with speech that involve specialized networks within the auditory brainstem. This research has been instrumental in his development of new cochlear implant speech processing strategies that have been patented and currently undergoing pilot clinical trials. His recent research interests have involved extending these concepts from the auditory system to the visual system in order to develop visual stimulation paradigms for retinal implants.

Prof. Burkitt’s research in neural modelling of biological systems has had an impact upon the development and understanding of neural models of information processing, i.e., how information is encoded, transmitted and decoded within neural systems. In addition, he has carried out work on understanding the neural basis of epileptic seizures and methods for detecting and predicting seizures. He is currently also involved in research to use electrical stimulation for seizure abatement in epilepsy.