Professor Laura Viani, MSc, FRCSI
Vice President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and incoming president of the College from 2022. Consultant Otolaryngologist and Neurotologist to Beaumont Hospital and Temple Street University Children’s Hospital.
Speaker's biography
Professor Laura Viani is Vice President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and incoming president of the College from 2022.
She is a Consultant Otolaryngologist and Neurotologist to Beaumont Hospital and Temple Street University Children’s Hospital.
A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, she pursued her Otolaryngology training in Dublin, Manchester and Liverpool and was appointed as a Consultant to Beaumont Hospital in 1993.
Recognising the absence of service for profoundly deaf children and adults in the Irish State she undertook Fellowships in skull base surgery in Cambridge, UK and in neuro-otology in Zurich, Switzerland before returning to Ireland in 1995 to perform Irelands first cochlear implant. To date she, and laterally with her colleagues Peter Walsh and Fergal Glynn, has carried out over 1000 cochlear implants in profoundly deaf children and adults.
From modest beginnings, she established Ireland’s first and only cochlear implant program in 1995, which has grown to become the National Hearing Implant and Research Centre. It has secured an annual ring-fenced budget of €6.8 million and has raised an administrative budget of over €90 million since inception Laura is Director of this stand-alone unit at Beaumont Hospital, with a multidisciplinary team of over 30 professionals, caring for children and adults with profound hearing loss from all over Ireland.
With its unique and comprehensive database, she has established the multi-institutional Hearing Research Centre comprising of a network of professionals from Beaumont and Temple Street Hospitals, the RCSI and Trinity College Dublin. She also established research collaborations with Vanderbilt University, in the United States. She has supervised many PhD and MSc theses for students in TCD and RCSI.
As a popular trainer and mentor, she has recognized the need for hands-on training, not just for Fellows and Specialist Registrars but all training and service grades rotating through her unit. She is a member of the Court of Examiners of the RCSI and convener of the Otolaryngology Section at the Charter Day meetings.
She is recognized as been a Council Member of the RCSI since 2000. She is past president of the Otolaryngology Section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland and past president of the Student Surgical Society in the RCSI. She is an Honorary Associate Professor of Surgery in RCSI and an Honorary Adjunct Professor in School of Medicine Trinity College Dublin.
Her commitment to research, teaching and service has been recognized through numerous awards including the RAMI Registrar Prize (1986), the Research Fellowship of the RCSI (1986), the Augustine Mehigan Scholarship (1992), the TWJ Scholarship 1993 and the Angel James Prize London (2000), the Graves Lecturer (2012), The Philip Stell Award from The North of England Otolaryngology Society (2019). and Outstanding Teaching Award from Bahrain and Middle East Otolaryngology (2019). She was awarded the Inaugural CPL Global World Class Talent Award (2019). She has been a visiting Professor in the Cochlear Institutes of Sydney, Melbourne and Bahrain and she is an advisor on cochlear implantation to training centres both in the Middle East and South America.
