Audiology Australia (AudA) Online Conference 2026 is Australian audiology’s premier ‘home conference’, offering a ‘little bit of everything’ to ensure you can benefit from a diverse range of educational content.
At the heart of the program are our speakers sharing their valuable research and on-the-job insights to help audiologists keep up to date with the latest advancements in audiology.
Want to learn more about a speaker and their session? Click who interests you below. Then, once you’re done, make sure to register for the event on the AudA Online Conference website.
Thursday 15 October
- Adj A/Prof Dona Jayakody, ‘Hearing Intervention and Cognitive Health: Understanding the Latest Evidence’.
- Meredith Cook, ‘The Dizzy Client in Your Clinic: Red Flags and Referral Decisions’.
- Keith Chittleborough, ‘Complex Fittings, Practical Solutions: A Clinical Case Discussion’.
Friday 16 October
- Dr Eliot Shearer, ‘Gene Therapy for Paediatric Hearing Loss: What Every Audiologist Needs to Know’.
- Dr Christo Bester, ‘The Aussie Ear Bank: Building the Foundation for Future Hearing Treatments’.
- Jermy Pang, ‘Lost in Transition: Rethinking Paediatric-to-Adult Hearing Healthcare Pathways Through Youth Voices’.
- Professor Grant Searchfield, ‘From Evidence to Intervention: New Directions in Tinnitus Care’.
More to come!
Thursday 15 October, 3:35–4:15 PM, Adj A/Prof Dona Jayakody, ‘Hearing Intervention and Cognitive Health: Understanding the Latest Evidence’
Why I became interested in the intersection between hearing loss and cognition
As a clinician, I saw many older clients struggling to remember names and events, and feeling lonely, anxious and isolated. I realised hearing loss affects far more than hearing. It affects wellbeing and cognitive health too. That’s what drew me to this work.
I’m excited that the conversation is shifting from hearing loss alone to brain health. I’d love to see even more of it.
What you’ll learn in my session
Attendees will learn which subtle behaviour changes to watch for, when to refer, and how to write a good referral. They’ll also better understand the challenges older clients face and how best to support them.
Australia’s population is ageing, and most of our clients are older adults. By looking beyond hearing loss to the whole person, we can better care for our clients.
Building awareness of hearing health remains a challenge
People still wait years before seeking help for their hearing. They wouldn’t wait with their heart health or vision. We need to build awareness, because when we know better, we make better decisions.
I feel truly blessed to be an audiologist
Knowing that my clinical and research work has made a difference in someone’s life brings me so much happiness. I feel truly blessed to be an audiologist.
To early career audiologists, I would recommend you find a good mentor. Many experienced hearing healthcare professionals are out there. Find a good mentor and learn from them. My mentors were so generous with their time and knowledge. Whenever I thanked them, they said, ‘Pay it forward.’
Thursday 15 October, 4:55–5:30 PM, Meredith Cook, ‘The Dizzy Client in Your Clinic: Red Flags and Referral Decisions’
At university, I grew a love of neurology
During honors, my thesis was on patients with facial nerve paralysis. With the close proximity of the facial nerve and vestibulocochlear nerve, I developed a deeper understanding and interest in the vestibular system. When I graduated I was fortunate to be in the position to immediately grow in my skills in these areas as I worked with patients experiencing both facial and vestibular dysfunction following Acoustic Neuroma removal. These symptoms have a significant impact on patients’ quality of life, so being able to help in any way brings great joy.
Helping audiologists manage patient dizziness and balance disorders
Dizziness and balance disorders are common across all ages, and audiologists can frequently be one of the first clinicians to see these patients. Knowing what to look out for, what to ask, and who to refer to can make a big difference in their journey. Your valuable assessment of the inner ear, and hearing rehabilitation can also be a crucial component of their management.
Attendees will leave my session with greater confidence in triaging patients who present with dizziness, including recognising when a patient may benefit from vestibular physiotherapy and when further investigation or referral to ENT or neurology is indicated.
Creating an integrated health care team
I have been excited to see more audiologists train in vestibular function testing. The ability to test objectively all five balance organs of the inner ear is an incredible advancement and of great benefit to patients.
Medical professionals working with dizzy patients can sometimes feel like they work in a silo. The ideal scenario is to have audiologists, physiothrapists, ENTs and neurologists working together providing holistic services, but this is not always possible.
Thursday 15 October, 6–7 PM, Keith Chittleborough, ‘Complex Fittings, Practical Solutions: A Clinical Case Discussion’
Who I am
I’m an everyday, normal audiologist who does hearing tests and fits hearing aids for a living.
I will share practical insights with attendees
Hearing aids are our best tool for rehabilitating one of the most ubiquitous of debilitating sensory impairments. It behoves us to do it well.
[Attendees will learn about] real-world experiences where fittings did not necessarily go to plan, and what was done to course-correct.
What I think is important right now
- Only a limited proportion of the population who could benefit actually use hearing aids. There’s plenty of scope for improvement.
- How hearing aid technology (product) often comes before the importance of clinical competency (skill, experience, and equipment availability) in the consumer’s mind and in business structures.
- I am excited by the widespread adoption of cerumen removal.
Friday 16 October, 11:05–11:30 AM: Dr Eliot Shearer, ‘Gene Therapy for Paediatric Hearing Loss: What Every Audiologist Needs to Know’
How I got started in gene therapy
As a paediatric otolaryngologist, I see families daily who are facing a hearing loss diagnosis with no way to know its cause or trajectory. That gap led me to found the Translational Hearing Genomics Lab, where I could connect genetic diagnosis directly to new treatments like cochlear gene therapy.
Why gene therapy is so important right now
Gene therapy for hearing loss has moved from research to real clinical trials, with some, but not all, children achieving typical hearing thresholds. Audiologists are often the first professionals to see these children, so understanding who qualifies and why early genetic diagnosis matters is now essential to their daily practice.
Genetic testing for paediatric hearing loss has become far more accessible, [and in the US is] now covered by both private and public insurance and available through free testing programs. That shift means more children are getting the accurate, early diagnosis that gene therapy and other targeted treatments depend on.
[It’s important to] get comfortable with genetics now, because it is quickly becoming as central to hearing health as audiometry itself. The audiologists who understand both the diagnostic and genetic sides of hearing loss will be the ones best positioned to guide families toward these new treatments.
What you will leave my session with
Attendees will leave with a clear framework for recognising when genetic testing may be appropriate for paediatric sensorineural hearing loss, greater confidence in understanding genetic test results and their audiological implications, and practical insight into emerging gene therapy outcomes to support informed conversations with clients and families.
The challenge of addressing genetic causes of hearing loss
There are hundreds of distinct genetic causes of hearing loss, each potentially needing its own therapy, and our current development and regulatory pipeline is not built to keep pace with that scale. Closing that gap will require much closer collaboration between scientists and regulators.
Friday 16 October, 11:30 AM – 12 PM, Dr Christo Bester, ‘The Aussie Ear Bank: Building the Foundation for Future Hearing Treatments’
I enjoy working at the crossroads of hearing care and auditory science
Hearing care and auditory science is at a perfect sweet spot. On one side, we have therapies with decades of evidence behind them we can support now, and on the other we have genetic and regenerative therapies that are being trialled in humans right now. Very few fields let you work at both ends of this spectrum at once, simultaneously improving life for the clients in front of us today, while building something entirely new for people our current options aren’t helping enough. We get to improve hearing aid design or cochlear implant surgical and programming approaches, while also using stem cell and gene editing technologies to develop entirely new therapies!
The way we treat hearing loss is changing
We all might have heard the eventual promised of genetic and regenerative therapies, but after years on the horizon these are actually arriving now. The first gene therapies for inherited hearing loss are already in human trials overseas, and genetic therapies promoting neural regeneration are being pioneered in Australia right now. Understanding the inherited side of your client’s hearing is going to shape how you counsel them, which therapies they’re likely to respond to, and whether they come to you for a hearing aid, a cochlear implant, or very soon, a gene therapy.
Talking about genetics with confidence will become an in-demand skill
Talking about genetics with confidence is a skill we’re all going to need, and it is a fantastically complicated field. This talk is designed to give you a working guide to the language of genetics, and guidance of some of the big genes worth watching out for. We will talk about genetic testing approaches in Australia today, and outline how new genetic therapies are built. No prior genetics knowledge is required.
Change is exciting
Our picture of what clients actually need keeps widening, many of us are working on expanding out from PTAs and speech in quiet scores to more complex behavioural and electrophysiological measurements, assessments of quality of life, and now genetics. In my opinion, the challenges that this brings are the fun kind! It also means none of us can do it alone: clinicians, researchers and clients working as one team is how the best work gets done, because none of us are going to be able to hold all the knowledge required to progress the field, and this is exactly how the Aussie Ear Bank has been built.
To early career audiologists, I would encourage you to stay curious about everything, especially those things you might not immediately think of being in your field! A wide range of knowledge means you’ll be able to roll with the punches as new therapies start actually being released. Maybe this is more important for us researchers, but it is an important time to reiterate that client care has to be at the centre of every decision, as therapies and technologies keep changing, the care we need to bring won’t.
Friday 16 October, 12–1 PM, Jermy Pang, ‘Lost in Transition: Rethinking Paediatric-to-Adult Hearing Healthcare Pathways Through Youth Voices’
Why I became interested in the paediatric-to-adult hearing health care pathway
I came to this work from more than one direction: I’m an audiologist and researcher, and I also have lived and living experience of deafness, so the move from paediatric to adult hearing care has never felt abstract to me. In clinic and in community, I kept noticing that young people who had been well supported as children often seemed to drift out of view as young adults. That wasn’t because they stopped needing support, but it was because the systems around them changed shape. My doctoral research at the University of Queensland gave me the space to understand that moment from young people’s own perspectives, centring their expertise across the research process, and to do it alongside them.
What I enjoy most is being trusted with people’s stories. Whether I’m working with young people in research or alongside families and community advisors, those conversations remind me that hearing care is relationship work. The moment a young person realises their experience counts as knowledge and expertise, and that it can change how services work, is what drives everything I do.
We need to ensure supports are in place for young people
Deaf and hard-of-hearing young people are moving into adulthood at a time when study, work, relationships and independence are all shifting at once. Our research suggests that responsibility for hearing care is often handed to young people before the support to carry it is in place. That makes transition a clinical question as much as an administrative one. How we prepare young people, and how adult services welcome them, shapes whether they stay connected to hearing care and whether they feel that care belongs to them.
Here’s what you’ll learn in my session
Adolescent and young adult health is increasingly recognised as a specialty area in its own right, distinct from both paediatric and adult care. Young people in this life stage occupy a unique space in healthcare systems, and hearing care is no exception. Attendees will leave with practical ways to start transition conversations earlier and to share responsibility with young people gradually rather than all at once. I’ll draw on young people’s own words and creative works to show what helped them and what they wish their clinicians had asked. Attendees will also take away questions they can bring into appointments to centre young people’s priorities, including their social and emotional wellbeing alongside their devices, or their choice not to use them.
Opportunities and challenges when it comes to relational care
Hearing care is still largely organised around devices and eligibility rather than around people’s lives. Young adults feel this most sharply at transition, when services change just as everything else in their lives does. The challenge for our profession is to make room for relational care that follows the person, and not only the hearing technology, while working within real time and funding pressures.
At the same time, I am excited by the growing recognition that people with lived experience, including young people, belong in the room where research, services and policy are shaped. Through my work with youth and parent co-researchers, I’ve seen how much sharper, kinder, and more relevant our questions become when d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people and families help set them. It marks a meaningful shift in audiology from doing research on communities to doing it with them. Ultimately, it makes space for that work to be led by them.
Friday 16 October, 2:30–3:30 PM, Professor Grant Searchfield, ‘From Evidence to Intervention: New Directions in Tinnitus Care’
Why my research has focused on tinnitus
As a newly minted audiologist, I met many people whose lives were significantly affected by tinnitus, yet there were relatively few effective tools available to help them. I wanted to do research, and tinnitus seemed like a gnarly topic. I was also drawn to tinnitus because it sits at the intersection of hearing, neuroscience, psychology, and human experience.
That has driven more than two decades of research into attention, perception, neuroplasticity, sound therapy, and patient-centred management. My goal has always been to translate research findings into practical solutions that improve the lives of people living with tinnitus.
What my session is about
In my session at the Audiology Australia Online Conference, attendees will leave with practical approaches they can implement immediately in clinical practice. These include:
- using patient goals to guide assessment and treatment planning
- understanding how attention, sound environments, and emotional responses influence tinnitus perception
- applying counselling strategies that improve engagement and self-efficacy
- personalising sound therapy based on individual needs rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach
- identifying opportunities to use digital tools and remote monitoring to support long-term patient outcomes.
I think personalised hearing health care is an exciting direction
There is growing recognition that hearing health care is about participation, wellbeing, and quality of life, not simply hearing aids. The profession is moving beyond a narrow focus on hearing thresholds and amplification toward a broader understanding of how people experience hearing and hearing-related disorders in everyday life.
One of the most exciting changes has been the move toward personalised hearing health care. Advances in digital technology, mobile health, artificial intelligence, and data analytics are allowing us to tailor interventions to individual needs in ways that were not possible even a decade ago. That shift is creating opportunities for innovation.
One of our biggest challenges will be to ensure that evidence-informed hearing healthcare remains sustainable. We need new models of care that combine clinical expertise with technology while maintaining the therapeutic relationship at the heart of good audiological practice.
My advice to early career audiologists? ‘Stay curious’
Stay curious and never stop learning. Audiology is evolving rapidly, and some of the most important advances occur when we look beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Remember that a person is behind every test result. The ability to listen, understand someone’s goals, and work collaboratively toward solutions is what ultimately makes the greatest difference.
Explore the online conference
You’ll be able to attend the sessions live on 15 and 16 October 2026 and watch the recordings until 31 January 2027.
See more at audaonline.com.au.