Peter Blamey
Peter is the Assistant Director of The Bionic Ear Institute and has over 30 years of experience of research, development and commercialization of cochlear implant and hearing aid technologies. He is a co-inventor on 19 patent application families and co-author of over 150 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. He is also the Managing Director of Australia Hears Pty Ltd, an Honory Professorial Fellow in the Department of Otolaryngology at The University of Melbourne, a Director of America Hears Inc, and a Director of the Children's Charity Network.
As a member of Graeme Clark's cochlear implant team in 1979 when the first patient was implanted, Peter had first hand experience of psychophysics, sound processing, and clinical evaluation. His role in the Bionic Eye project will be supervision and guidance of the corresponding psychophysics, vision processing, and clinical evaluation aspects of the project. The lessons learned from cochlear implants will help to avoid pitfalls and accelerate progress by identifying potential problems ahead of time. He will participate in design of psychophysical and vision processing research experiments, high-level design of software and hardware to conduct the experiments, analysis of data, and publication of results.
Peter's commercial experience in the area of intellectual property management and strategy will be applied to the Bionic Eye project to add value and competitive advantage to the devices produced. Peter's research expertise and management experience will help the BEI to play a leading role in the coordination and communication between the engineering teams at UNSW, NICTA and the University of Melbourne and the clinical team at CERA in order to optimise the clinical outcomes through technical innovation.
