2023 Hearing Therapeutics Summit

Meet the Organising Committee

Dr Ralph Holme

Director of Research and Insight, RNID, UK

Dr Ralph Holme leads RNID’s work to accelerate the discovery and development of treatments for hearing loss and tinnitus. Working globally, RNID fund ground-breaking research, build future research capacity, and connect innovators to the knowledge and resources they need to succeed.

Ralph is also executive sponsor for RNID’s Insight & Policy, and Digital & Innovation teams. These capabilities ensure RNID understands the issues that matter the most to people who are deaf, have hearing loss or tinnitus, can influence across sectors to bring about change, and design and deliver products and services people need.

Before joining RNID, Ralph was a Postdoctoral Scientist investigating the genetic basis of deafness at the MRC’s Institute of Hearing Research in Nottingham. He completed his PhD on vertebrate eye development in 1998 at the MRC’s Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh.

Dr Catherine Perrodin

Senior Therapeutics Manager, RNID, UK

Dr Catherine Perrodin leads RNID’s hearing therapeutics development programme, with a goal of bringing new treatments to patients, faster. She heads the Hearing Therapeutics Initiative, an externally-facing service advising innovators from academia and industry worldwide on translational development, identifying funding/investment opportunities, and brokering bespoke introductions to expert partners.

Catherine also manages RNID’s Translational Grants scheme, a research funding programme aimed at de-risking preclinical drug development projects for hearing loss and tinnitus at academic institutions and SMEs worldwide. Catherine is a biomedical engineer and auditory neuroscientist with 15 years of experience in auditory neuroscience research.

Prior to joining RNID in 2021, Catherine was a Wellcome Fellow at University College London (UK), where she established and led a research programme on the perception and neural coding of sound sequences for vocal communication in mice. She holds a BSc and MSC from EPFL (Switzerland). Catherine was awarded her PhD in Natural Sciences from the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (Germany), following doctoral research in systems neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

Prof Jonathan Gale

Director, UCL Ear Institute, London, UK

Jonathan Gale is a Professor of Auditory Cell Biology and Director of the UCL Ear Institute; he is a founding member of the UCL Ear Institute (formed in 2005). Jonathan was the first Deafness Research UK (now RNID) PhD student. He was awarded a Wellcome Trust Prize International-Travelling Fellowship (1995) and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (1999-2007).

In 2000 Jonathan joined UCL and set up his lab studying the mechanisms of damage, survival, repair and regeneration in the inner ear funded by the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust. Since then, his lab has also been funded by: Action on Hearing Loss (now RNID), Dunhill Medical Trust, BBSRC, EPSRC, MRC and the NIHR BRC. He became the Ear Institute Director in January 2019 after a period as Interim Director.

Jonathan teaches Anatomy & Physiology of sensory systems at UCL, is Faculty on the MBL Biology of the Inner Ear Course, an active member of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology and has been Associate Editor for JARO.

Prof Anne GM Schilder

Director NIHR UCHL Biomedical Research Centre Hearing Health Theme, UCL Ear Institute, UK

Anne GM Schilder is Professor of Otorhinolaryngology at the UCL Ear Institute and Director of Translational Hearing Research at the National Institute for Health Research UCL Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. Her research focuses on the translation of hearing discoveries into novel treatments for patients with hearing loss. It ranges from designing and delivering first-in-man trials, analysis of routine health data, to health economics and health policy to prepare healthcare systems for the arrival of drug, cell and gene therapies for hearing loss.

She is a commissioner of The Lancet Commission on Global Hearing Loss and founding member of the International Society for Inner Ear Therapeutics. Anne practices Pediatric ENT at the UCLH Royal National Ear Nose and Throat Hospital and holds an honorary chair at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands where she works with primary care researchers on developing evidence-based interventions for otitis media in children.

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