INNER EAR ORGANOIDS FOR THE STUDY OF HUMAN HEARING AND BALANCE
Dr Jackie Ogier
Passe & Williams Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Audiology and Speech Pathology
University of Melbourne

RESEARCHER PROFILE  (Filmed in Melbourne | August 2024)

Dr Jackie Ogier is an auditory neuroscientist, with a research focus on the molecular biology of hair cells, the specialised sensory receptors in the ear that detect sound and balance. She is a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of A/Prof Bryony Nayagam, supported by a prestigious Passe and Williams foundation fellowship.

Dr Ogier completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Melbourne in 2020, where she investigated the pathogenic mechanisms underlying hearing loss and identified a novel molecular target for preventing aminoglycoside-induced hearing damage. She performed this research at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute under the guidance of  A/Prof Paul Lockhart, A/Prof Bryony Nayagam, and Dr Rachel Burt. During this time, she was President of the Research Students Association and a member of the MCRI Honours and Children’s Campus Graduate Research Training Committees. For her service to discipline, she was recognised with the MCRI Rising Star award in 2017.

Dr Ogier then undertook post-doctoral training at the Sunnybrook Research Institute (University of Toronto) with Prof Alain Dabdoub, where she optimised the collection, dissection, and culture of donated human cochleae for single cell sequencing. She also received The University of Toronto’s Dr Ian Witterick Research Prize in Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery for her continued ototoxicity research. Jackie subsequently established a collaboration between the Universities of Toronto and Melbourne to develop an “inner ear in a dish” that will accelerate hearing and balance discovery research.

Dr Ogier’s experience broadly spans the genetics of hearing loss, disease modelling, micro dissection, primary cell culture, stem cell culture, organoids, and proteomics. Overall, she aims to generate knowledge of hearing and vestibular sensory biology.