Presenter - Dr Robert Patuzzi

Dr Robert Patuzzi completed an Honours degree in electronics engineering at UWA before researching auditory biophysics for his Physiology PhD, later obtaining a Dip Ed in Science and Maths teaching. He has investigated the fundamental causes of deafness, and cost-effective methods for screening and diagnosis, including those for neonatal deafness, auditory neuropathy and central auditory processing disorder. He was part of the team that first measured the normal atomic vibration within the cochlea in the 1980's, and has measured from auditory hair cells and neurones, determining many of the fundamental mechanisms of hearing and deafness. Responding to community needs, he established the Master of Clinical Audiology program at UWA in 2000, with its graduates now accounting for the majority of clinical audiologists in WA, with his students running many audiology programs in Australia and overseas. While Dr Patuzzi’s key research area has been the fundamental hearing mechanism in various species (from crickets to humans), he has also studied epithelial physiology, the neurological control of breathing, and the generation and measurement of rhinitis. He has also developed novel techniques in vestibular diagnosis, including oVEMP measurement. He was voted a Fellow of the Audiological Society of Australia, and a life member of the Neuro-Otological Society of Australia, and has served on the Editorial Board of the international journal Hearing Research for almost 20 years. He was President of the Australian Deafness Council (WA) for two terms, the Director of the UWA Audiology program for 15 years, and was Chairman of the scientific advisory panel for Australia's HearingCRC. Before his retirement, he supervised more than 100 research projects for the audiology program that ranged from the fundamentals of cochlear function and efficient diagnostic methods, to the sociology of deafness, educational audiology, audiology teaching, and noise induced hearing loss. After 35 years as an academic in Physiology at UWA, teaching physiology, neuroscience and molecular biology, Dr Patuzzi retired in 2014. Between 2012 and 2015 he developed a new method of measuring nanometer movements within the living inner ear of experimental animals, which required the development of techniques to ultra-stabilize the inner ear to nanometer accuracy. Since his retirement he has developed techniques for intra-operative monitoring of hearing, has contributed entries on hearing, cochlear deafness and electrocochleography to the SAGE Encyclopaedia of Human Communication Sciences and Disorders, and has renovated too many houses, raised not enough puppies, and grown a very large number of plants and flowers.