PhD Projects Available

Evidence have demonstrated that the auditory system constantly changes in the structure and function, extending from peripheral structures into auditory cortex, in response to changes in auditory input.

The duration of auditory system plasticity ranges from rapid adaptation to stimulus to long-term changes associated with hearing loss or cochlear implantation. Most forms of auditory system plasticity are adaptive to optimise auditory performance, which in principle can be used for therapeutic purposes.

This project aims to establishing a model that capture the general principles of auditory system plasticity from peripheral structures to auditory cortex. Specifically, we aim to develop a model of auditory system that allows the investigation of the underlying mechanisms of the plasticity at different levels of the auditory pathway, and to investigate possible plasticity-based strategies that may prevent/reverse the functional and organisational changes in auditory cortex caused by hearing loss. The outcome of the project may lead to future clinical changes towards the neuroplasticity-based therapeutic interventions for cochlear Implant rehabilitation.

General methods to be used in the project: Computational modeling, Electrophysiology

Suitable background of students: Biomedicine or Engineering (eg. Biomedical, Electrical)

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

Children with a permanent hearing loss could severely impair language development, leading to life-long impact on their education, employment, social and mental health. The delay between identification of hearing loss and provision of optimal access to sound via a hearing instrument is extremely detrimental to language development. Hearing research have always been seeking to better understand the relationship between the neural mechanisms and speech understanding, with the goals of advancing hearing device technology and improving hearing loss diagnosis and management. Functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a safe, non-invasive technique that making it ideal for the assessment of hearing mechanisms. In this project, we use fNIRS to record the cortical neural response to sounds. This project aims to analyse the fNIRS response of sleeping infants to better understand their discrimination ability of different sound intensities and speech contrasts.

General methods to be used in the project: fNIRS, signal processing, data mining.

Suitable background of students: Engineer/IT/Neuroscience graduate with good signal processing and programming skills. Strong interpersonal skills are required as the student will be working in a multi-disciplinary team and will be working with study participants.

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

Hair cells, the receptor cells for sound, are a highly susceptible part of the auditory system. Hair cell loss is the leading cause of deafness, occurring in almost half a billion people worldwide.

Despite the prevalence, there are no biological treatments available for deafness. The current standards of care are restricted to palliative devices including hearing aids or cochlear implants that provide only partial hearing restoration for a limited patient population. As such, there is a significant demand for the development of a pharmacological treatment for hearing loss.

Manipulating specific cell developmental pathways in cochlear stem cells is a potential approach to activate hair cell regeneration and reverse hearing loss. This project aims to test small molecules or drugs that regulate pathways required for hair cell development for the treatment of hearing loss. The available projects fall into two categories and can be modified to suit individual background/strengths.

1. In vitro: Developing a drug screening platform to test the efficacy of small molecules or drugs in promoting hair cell differentiation
2. In vivo: Investigating the potential of specific drug treatments in promoting hair cell regeneration and restoring hearing function in pre-clinical deafness models

Internal funding may be available to support a stipend for competitive and highly motivated students working in this project.

General methods to be used in the project: application of cell culture, next-generation sequencing, standard molecular biology, surgery, histology, and hearing physiology techniques to assess the efficacy of drug treatments in experimental models.

Suitable background of students: Cell or molecular biology, physiology, biomedicine, genetics or neuroscience.

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

This project will expand Bionics Institute’s vagus nerve stimulation technology and utilise novel thin-film fabrication techniques to develop a miniaturised peripheral nerve array for abdominal vagus nerve of mice.

The peripheral nervous system has extensive surgically accessible nerve connections with the central nervous system and the body’s organs, in particular the gastrointestinal tract. This provides the opportunity to exploit rapidly advancing methods of electrically stimulating the peripheral nervous system to treat human diseases. At the core of such ‘electric medicine’ research lies the concept of stimulating the vagus nerve, an autonomic nerve that has successfully been used as a clinical treatment of epilepsy, depression, migraines, obesity, and shows promise as a treatment for the immune-mediated diseases inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis. The effects of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) are diverse and has created considerable interest in the clinical community as we are only scratching the surface of what this system is capable of.

At the Bionics Institute, we have previously developed and validated a cuff electrode array designed for long-term implantation onto the abdominal vagus nerve of rats and sheep. This technology was used to valid the efficacy of vagus nerve stimulation to relieve experimental intestinal inflammation and is now entering clinical trials for the treatment of Crohn’s disease. There are numerous mouse genetic models of human diseases, which are an essential tool for understanding mechanisms of disease and discovering new therapies. As such, the overall goal of this project is to expand our vagus nerve stimulation technology and adapt it to awake, freely moving mice. Specifically, the project aims to utilise novel thin-film fabrication techniques to develop a miniaturised peripheral nerve array, designed for safe, long-term implantation onto the abdominal vagus nerve of awake mice. Efficacy of stimulation will be assessed in a mouse disease model.

General methods to be used in the project: Electrode design and development, fabrication of electrodes, chronic in vivo stimulation and recording and electrophysiological testing, histology, intestinal permeability, molecular and microbial assays

Suitable background of students: Bioengineering, Electrical engineering, Neuroscience

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

Babies born with hearing impairment can miss out on the vital sounds they need to hear to learn to speak. If the right hearing treatment is not provided in the first months of life, they never fully catch up with their peers, and have a permanent communication deficit delay.

In our lab, we have pioneered a new hearing test that informs if a baby can hear the difference between speech sounds using functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS), a light-based non-invasive brain imaging technique.

This project aims to interpret fNIRS data recorded from sleeping infants with cochlear implants to develop an objective method to appropriately program cochlear implants for babies early in life so that they can learn to speak and have the best start in life.

General methods to be used in the project: fNIRS, signal processing, data mining

Suitable background of students: Engineer/IT/Neuroscience graduate with good signal processing and programming skills. Strong interpersonal skills are required as the student will be working in a multi-disciplinary team and will be working with study participants.

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

Behavioural training in pre-clinical models allows the testing of perception of complex sounds. When applied to models with cochlear implants or treated with hearing therapeutics, this provides important information on the performance of the intervention.

This can provide more clinically relevant information than is obtained with traditional functional measurements or from histology. This added information is important, as many treatments or stimulation techniques look promising in pre-clinical models but fail in the clinic. Using behavioural training, we aim to reduce the gap between pre-clinical and clinical studies.

This project will develop new techniques for behavioural training in pre-clinical models and test the response to complex stimuli. Results will be compared against traditional electrophysiological recordings and histology.

General methods to be used in the project: behavioural training, signal processing, electrical engineering, electrophysiology.

Suitable background of students: science (e.g. biomedical) or engineering (biomedical, electrical).

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

Cochlear implants use electrical stimulation to restore hearing for people with severe to profound hearing loss. However, not every cochlear implant recipient achieves good speech understanding outcomes. The are many possible contributing neurological factors for poorer speech understanding outcomes.

One reason for this is the presence of neural ‘dead regions’ in the cochlea. These dead regions affect speech understanding by making it difficult for each component frequency in a speech signal to be independently heard. Thus, implant users experience a ‘scrambled’ speech signal. This project will evaluate and address patient-specific differences at the electrode-neuron interface to improve speech understanding outcomes.

In this project, we will use a psychophysical method to determine which parts of the cochlear contain neural dead regions in each individual. Then we will construct an individualised program for each individual that avoids using intra-cochlear electrodes that are near those dead regions. We will then evaluate whether this new individualised program improves their speech understanding. This project is a major opportunity to actually improve the quality of life of cochlear implantees and contribute to novel clinical management techniques.

This project will support potentially lead to new clinical procedures to optimize the programming of cochlear implants for individual people.

General methods to be used in the project: psychophysics, electrophysiology, and cochlear implant programming.

Suitable background of students: audiology, neuroscience, engineering, experimental psychology or related disciplines. Strong interpersonal skills are required as the student will be working directly with deaf individuals with a cochlear implant.

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

Cochlear implants use electrical stimulation to restore hearing for people with severe to profound hearing loss.

However, not every cochlear implant recipient achieves good speech understanding outcomes.

There are many possible contributing neurological factors for poorer speech understanding outcomes.

This project will evaluate cerebral cortex changes after implantation in recipients and how it correlates with speech understanding outcomes.

Our lab uses functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS), a light-based non-invasive brain imaging technique, to study how the brain reorganises after deafness and electric hearing restoration for cochlear implant recipients.

This project aims to record, analyse, and interpret fNIRS data recorded from cochlear implant recipients.

The data will then be applied in machine learning approaches to predict speech understanding outcomes.

TThe developed technology will enable clinicians to better allocate their time and resources and to increase the benefit that people will get from cochlear implants.

General methods to be used in the project: fNIRS, signal processing, machine learning.

Suitable background of students: Engineer graduate or data scientist with high-level signal processing skills

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

The sound encoding strategy of modern cochlear implants depends on pulsatile stimulation because the pulses need to be temporally interleaved to reduce the summation of electric fields across channels.

This summation effect occurs during multichannel electrical stimulation, including multichannel analog stimulation, due to the extensive spread of electrical current from each electrode.

However, it is well documented that many implant listeners perform better with analog stimulation compared to pulsatile stimulation strategies.

In terms of sound quality, it has been reported that participants using analog stimulation strategies could perceive a “tonal” difference between analog and pulsatile stimulation, with descriptions of the sound being “bell-like” for analog and “harsh” and “distorted” for pulsatile.

Enabling technologies that reduce the spread of activation during stimulation are required for analog stimulation strategies to be more successfully implemented.

We have previously shown that optogenetic stimulation strategies significantly reduce the spread of activation and allow simultaneous stimulation with much lower interactions between channels.

The first aim of this project is to determine whether we can deliver more temporal information to the cochlea using analog light stimulation strategies. The second aim is to determine how well the brain encodes speech tokens during hybrid stimulation of the cochlea in quiet and in the presence of background noise.

The outcomes of the study have the potential to improve the sound quality for cochlear implant users, hence this research aligns with the Bionics Institute’s mission to develop devices the modulate neural activity for managing health conditions.

General methods to be used in the project: Acute surgical methods (cochlear implantation, insertion of recording electrodes), acute electrophysiological recordings, signal processing and data analysis.

Suitable background of students: Neuroscience, Physiology, Biomedical Science, Medical Biotechnology

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

The urine produced by the kidneys is stored in the bladder prior to being voided from the body at behaviourally appropriate times (micturition).

However, a number of conditions including spinal cord injury or damage during prostectomy or colorectal resection surgery can lead to urinary incontinence or retention.

Controlling urination with a bionic device implanted onto nerves that innervate the bladder is a novel technique for the treatment of bladder incontinence/retention.

The Bionics Institute have developed a novel method of monitoring activity in the pelvic nerve. Combining this technology with stimulation to activate or inhibit neural signals in order to trigger or prevent urination could form the basis of a closed-loop bioelectric bladder control device.

This project will use the rodent urogenital system to further develop neural recording and stimulation technology to be able to selectively record and active different neural fibre types so that this technology can be utilized to develop closed-loop control over bladder function.

General methods to be used in the project: Electrophysiology; Electrical Stimulation; Physiology; Control Engineering; Histology

Suitable background of students: Neuroscience; endocrinology; bioengineering; physiology; biomedical science.

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

Chronic pain has a huge impact on individuals, families and the healthcare system and the use of pain killers leads to addiction and, too often, overdose.

Electrical implants are a relatively new treatment for chronic pain, but electrical stimulation cannot easily discriminate between the numerous types of fibres in mixed nerve bundles, making it difficult to address pain safely. This shortcoming is preventing its widespread uptake.

We have developed technology that can selectively address nerve fibres relating to pain signalling within a mixed peripheral nerve.

Using optogenetics, we used light to excite only the nerve fibres of interest, leaving neighbouring fibres unaffected. We showed that a combination of light and electrical stimulation provided better precision, efficiency, and safety compared to electrical or optical stimulation alone.

In this project, we aim to compare selective combined stimulation with existing electrical-only methods for pain suppression. We will use an excitatory opsin that is selectively expressed in touch sensory fibres that can mediate analgesia via gating mechanisms. Using electrophysiological readouts (compound action potential and single unit recordings in the sciatic nerve and local field potentials in the dorsal horn) and awake pain behavioural assays in chronically implanted injured rats, we will assess the ability of our selective technologies to block nerve signalling and suppress pain. We will compare these methods to electrical nerve block methods used clinically.

This research aligns with BI’s mission to develop devices the modulate neural activity for managing health conditions.

General methods to be used in the project: Electrophysiological recordings, surgical injection of a viral vector, surgical implantation of a nerve cuff device made in-house, histology, behavioural assays.

Suitable background of students: Neuroscience, Physiology, Biomedical Science, Medical Biotechnology

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

The aim of this project is to develop the next generation of neural stimulation devices that use optical stimulation or combined optical/electrical stimulation in order to improve the precision of neural activation. The project will use cutting edge optogenetic techniques to express a light sensitive ion channel in neurons so that they can be activated with low-powered blue micro-LEDs.

Electrophysiological recordings will be used to examine whether optical stimulation strategies can improve the spatial precision of neural activation. A significant advantage of improved precision of stimulation of the auditory nerve, for example, would be the ability to stimulate independent channels that would greatly enrich the auditory percept from a cochlear implant, such as the ability to perceive music.

General methods to be used in the project: electrophysiology, viral gene therapy, surgical device implantation, optical/electrical stimulation, optical modelling, cell culture, histology, immunohistochemistry, behavioural testing.

Suitable background of students: first class honours or equivalent in any of the following disciplines: neuroscience, physiology, biomedical engineering, or similar degrees. Electrophysiology and cell culture skills are desirable.

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an established therapy for several neurological and psychiatric conditions. The therapy involves surgical implantation of electrodes to a target brain region, and delivery of continuous electrical impulses via a neurostimulator to modulate abnormal neural activity.

Despite its rapid implementation and success, undesirable side effects remain a major limitation. These are caused by non-selective stimulation of a mixed population of neurons due to inaccurate electrode positioning and/or spread of electrical current to non-target regions. There is an unmet clinical need to develop approaches that can selectively activate specific neurons or axonal pathways within a DBS target to reduce stimulation-induced side effects and improve the overall effectiveness of the therapy. We recently discovered that hybrid stimulation, a combination of electric and optogenetic stimulation improves the precision of neural activation in the auditory system.

This project aims to explore the potential of hybrid stimulation to improve neural selectivity and the overall efficacy of DBS.

General methods to be used in the project: Device development, stereotactic surgery, electrical/optical stimulation, recording and analysis.

Suitable background of students: Biomedical engineer, Neuroscience

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.

The expansion of criteria for cochlear implantation to include patients with substantial residual hearing has focused interest on the benefits of combined electro-acoustic stimulation (EAS). Although such stimulation via a hybrid cochlear implant (CI) and hearing aid in the same ear has been shown to improve speech understanding, particularly in noise, and to increase the aesthetic quality of sound, almost nothing is known about the physiological mechanisms underlying these benefits. A number of pre-clinical studies have been performed, but they have been based on normal hearing and used simple acoustic and electrical stimulation that are not representative of complex electrical and acoustic information that represent speech and have limited clinical relevance. This project will address this deficiency by investigating EAS in an appropriate model with clinically relevant acoustic and electrical stimuli.

General methods to be used in the project: Electrophysiology, behavioural training, and electrical stimulation.

Suitable background of students: Science, Biomedicine, or Engineering (e.g., Biomedical, Electrical).

To register your interest in completing this PhD at the Bionics Institute please complete the registration form.