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.
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Stem cells used for age-related macular degeneration
Dr. Jenna Hall is a passionate and accomplished biologist with expertise in induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) culture, disease modelling, and high-throughput automated systems. She recently earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne, where her research focused on using iPSC-derived retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells to study age-related macular degeneration. Dr Hall’s technical skillset spans manual and automated cell reprogramming and differentiation, quantitative microscopy-based phenotyping, and large scale -omics analysis.
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Biostatistics in Clinical Trials
As a biostatistician working in research and clinical settings, Kate Francis plays a vital role in ensuring all projects adhere to best practice guidelines and are transparently reported. She has served as the lead statistician for the analysis of clinical trials across a broad range of subject areas, including neonatal resuscitation, BCG for allergy and infection, convulsive status epilepticus and her work has been published in the top journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and The Lancet. Most recently she was awarded the 2025 Excellence in Trial Statistics Award for her work on the PLUSS trial.
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Funding the best brains to beat brain cancer
The Charlie Teo Foundation is dedicated to funding and advancing research into brain cancer, with a particular focus on developing more effective treatments and finding a cure for this devastating disease.
Since its inception, the foundation has committed nearly $15 million to brain cancer research, funding notable projects in Australia and the United States. These projects explore innovative approaches to understand and treat brain cancer more effectively, with a focus on translating findings from animal studies to human applications. Charlie’s dedication to finding solutions for this devastating disease remains unwavering as he travels frequently to collaborate with global researchers.
