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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Good and bad extracellular vesicles in health and disease
Associate Professor Joy Wolfram has joint appointments in the School of Chemical Engineering and the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at The University of Queensland, and through her work at the AIBN, she aims to develop a new paradigm of therapeutics (using nanotechnology and cell products) to treat life-threatening diseases that are major causes of death globally, including cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and breast cancer.
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Next generation nanomedicine and radiopharmaceuticals to treat cancer
Finding better ways of treating cancer, aside from finding a cure, aim to provide a better quality of life for those who suffer from it.
Professor Thurecht’s work focuses on nanomedicine and spans across the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and the Centre for Advanced Imaging, at the University of Queensland in Australia.
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Identification & characterisation of molecular drivers of therapeutic resistance
Professor Pieter Eichhorn is an internationally experienced cancer biologist and research leader whose career has been defined by high-impact contributions at the interface of functional genomics, translational oncology, and research infrastructure strategy.
He completed his PhD at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, contributing to the cloning of the gene associated with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome, before undertaking postdoctoral training at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in the laboratory of René Bernards. There, he performed pioneering functional genetic screens that identified key regulators of oncogenesis and therapy resistance, including critical roles for the PI3K signalling pathway in resistance to targeted breast cancer therapies.
