Professor Graeme Clark

Professor Graeme Clark first conceived the idea of electrically stimulating the cochlea to restore hearing while still a medical student in 1954. After training as an ENT surgeon in the UK, he returned to research, completing a PhD in 1969 that established the principles of multi‑channel cochlear stimulation. He led the preclinical science, engineering development and fundraising that made the first multi‑channel cochlear implant possible, and on 1 August 1978 performed the pioneering surgery on Rod Saunders, who achieved open‑set speech understanding.

This led to the creation of the biomedical company Cochlear Limited. Clark’s team closely collaborated with their industrial partner so that its performance has continued to improve with the extraction of more speech information. In 1985, he implanted the first multi-channel cochlear implant in a child, and, in 1986, in a young child. Both implants continue to operate effectively after 40 years. In 1985 the Nucleus/Cochlear device was the first multi-channel implant to be approved by the US FDA and, in 1990, the first implant of any type to be approved by a World Health regulatory body. The Nucleus/Cochlear implant has had the dominant share of the international market in the past 40 years and has been implanted in over 700,000 people in 180 countries.

Clark’s research is increasingly focussed on the engineering of the cochlear implant and other prosthetic devices. He was honoured in 2016 when the University of Melbourne created the Graeme Clark Institute for Biomedical Engineering, of which he is a member.