AHH Research and Innovation Committee members

McAlpine is Professor of Hearing, Language and the Brain, Academic Director at Macquarie University Hearing, and an ARC Laureate Fellow. He is an acknowledged global leader in the field of auditory neuroscience and was recently awarded a prestigious Einstein Foundation Fellowship for a project to explore how auditory memories are formed in the listening brain. Previously, as Director of the UCL Ear Institute, he oversaw the Institute’s development into a world-class centre for discovery science and translational research.

Emma is Principal Audiologist for Adults at Hearing Australia, mainly responsible for service delivery and quality for adults with complex needs. She has delivered clinical services in the paediatric and adult areas for many years, and manages policy and practice for clients who have severe and profound hearing loss, have poor communication ability, or have other impairments in addition to hearing loss.

Alison King is Principal Audiologist for Paediatric Services at Hearing Australia. She has been a paediatric specialist for over 35 years. She is responsible for paediatric clinical protocols and quality and is involved in a number of research projects that aim to improve outcomes for children who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Viji Easwar is the head of Communication Sciences at the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL) where she leads NAL’s paediatric hearing research program. Viji joined NAL in March 2022 prior to which she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, USA. Her research interests include predicting outcomes in children with hearing loss particularly using neural measures.

Greg leigh is the Director of NextSense Institute and conjointly Professor of Education and at Macquarie University. Greg has served on numerous Australian Government consultative committees and is Chair of the Australasian Newborn Hearing Screening Committee. He is a former National President of the Education Commission for the World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf and Chair of the International Congress on Education of the Deaf. He is active in research and serves on the editorial boards of several journals in the field.

Aleisha took on the CEO role at The Shepherd Centre after 20 years in the organisation, most recently heading up the clinical and research teams. She has a clinical background in Speech Pathology and as a Certified Listening and Spoken Language Specialist, and has an active research interest in supporting outcomes to create a brighter better future for children and young people with hearing loss and their families. She is passionate about driving clinical innovation, sector collaboration, partnerships and designing services to address all communication needs including listening skills, social skills, executive function, literacy, family centred models and digital resources to support professionals in their work.

Zachary Smith is Director of Algorithms and Applications at Cochlear Limited, where he leads global research programs in sound processing and surgical tools and facilitates external research collaborations in Australia. He has worked in the cochlear implant research field for over 20 years and has a passion for improving access, effectiveness, and usability of hearing implants. Dr. Smith relocated to Australia from the United States in 2018 and before his industry career was trained and conducted research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Roger Chung is the Professor of Neurobiology and Neurochemistry and Deputy Dean Research and Innovation for the Faculty of Medicine, Health & Human Sciences. His main areas of research interest involve a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the basic biochemical, molecular and cellular mechanisms that underpin how neurons respond to injury or neurodegenerative disease, and how non-neuronal cells (glia) are involved in modulating this process.

Bamini Gopinath is the inaugural Cochlear Chair in Hearing and Health. She leads the Public Health and Policy Pillar of MU Hearing. She is an epidemiologist who has been actively involved in developing and conducting numerous population health studies. She has co-authored over 240 peer-reviewed papers, several of which have been in high-ranking medical and health journals (with over 5800 citations to her name). Using large population datasets Bamini has provided novel community-based evidence on the health determinants and health outcomes associated with a sensory loss and disability. Her ongoing research in the public health field aims to translate key study findings into health policy and practice.

Katherine Demuth is the founding Director of the Child Language Lab and the Director of the Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS) at Macquarie University. Demuth’s research focuses on Language Acquisition, including studies of both perception and production. She is especially interested in the development of phonological, morphological and syntactic representations, in both typically developing and language-impaired children and L2 learners.

Paul Sowman is the Director of Research in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University. He trained as a Physiotherapist at Otago University and later graduated with a PhD in Physiology from the University of Adelaide. He subsequently held fellowships with the NHMRC and ARC in the area of speech motor neuroscience. His research uses magnetoencephalography (MEG) and non-invasive brain stimulation methods to understand neural processes underpinning normal and abnormal cognitive development.

Rebecca Bull is a developmental cognitive psychologist whose research focuses on numerical cognition, mathematics, and executive functioning / self-regulation in diverse populations. Her research also looks at the environments in which children are learning and developing – this has included a focus on the informal numeracy interactions that may happen between children and parents, the pedagogical approaches to numeracy that educators use in early years learning environments, and the quality of educator-child interactions. Prior to her move to Australia in 2019, Rebecca was the Principal Research Scientist at the Centre for Research in Child Development, National Institute of Education (Singapore).

Louise Dodd provides the executive support for the Australian Hearing Hub Research and Innovation Committee.