Welcoming New Master of Audiology Students with Steven’s Temporal Bone Workshop

Welcoming New Master of Audiology Students with Steven’s Temporal Bone Workshop

It is the start of a new academic season, and the Translational Ear Physiology (TEP) team warmly welcomes three new Master of Audiology students into the group: Grace, Jooa, and Daarshini. Three audiology students will be undertaking a lab-based project with Haruna, with co-supervisors from Audiology, and are hosted by TEP. 

As part of their introduction to the lab, they were welcomed into Steven’s Temporal Bone Workshop. Steven Tran, a member of the TEP team in the TRIP programme, has, over time, developed and delivered an amazing temporal bone anatomy workshop. In this workshop, Steven uses 3D models of the human ear, alongside a very detailed presentation covering human and sheep ear anatomy. The workshop is designed to provide an introduction to how the ear works, and introduce key anatomical terminologies.

A key strength is that the models are derived from real human anatomy, and come in real-size as well as larger-scale forms. This is a great way to realise how small the inner ear is, how complex the anatomy of the temporal bone is, and ultimately, the challenge we are trying to address through research: how inaccessible the inner ear is.

Temporal bone workshop in a seminar room

This week, Steven ran a workshop with the three audiology students, joined by three physicist collaborators coming from the TRIP programme. They had a lovely interactive session, and throughout the workshop, so many questions were raised from both physicists and audiology students. It is a wonderful mix, an audience able to exchange different expertise. Audiologists are ear clinicians, and physicists are physics experts who can apply their knowledge of mathematics and physics to a biological context.

This puts our new students in a wonderful place: they have now seen their theoretical anatomy textbook knowledge brought to life in the models and presentation, and are well equipped to get into the lab and start practising dissection skills using the sheep’s temporal bone as a model. 

Huge thanks and well done to Steven for providing this workshop & Happy continuing learning about ear everyone! 

Learning ear anatomy is challenging but fun, especially together with colleagues in a team!