Oldenburg. Prof. Dr Mathias Dietz has been appointed to the professorship "Physiology and Modelling of Auditory Perception" at the School V - School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Oldenburg. The 39-year-old was previously an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Audiology at Western University in London (Ontario, Canada).

"With Professor Dietz, we have gained an outstanding scientist whose research into binaural hearing ranges from basic processes to individual therapies - such as cochlear implants - for people with hearing loss," explained Prof Dr Hans Gerd Nothwang, Dean of School V - School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Dietz studied physics at the University of Münster; he then worked as a research assistant in the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre "Active Hearing" at the University of Oldenburg, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Here he completed his doctorate in 2009 with a thesis on directional hearing. From 2011 to 2012, he conducted research at the Ear Institute of University College London (UK) as a scholarship holder of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He then headed a junior research group in the "Hearing4all" cluster of excellence at the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics at the University of Oldenburg until 2015. Since 2018, the European Research Council (ERC) has been funding Dietz's work with a Starting Grant totalling 1.5 million euros. His research centres on using detailed computer simulations of sound processing in the inner ear and brain to better understand how binaural - binaural - hearing works. He is also working on using acoustic and electrical methods to define the causes of hearing disorders more precisely and thus enable individualised diagnoses and therapies.

[Text/Photo: University press release from 8 October 2018]