Presidential address: Building models of disease and Meniere's Disease: The more we know the less we know

Jonny Harcourt has been a Consultant Otologist with a special interest in Neurototlogy and particularly Meniere’s disease for over 20 years and has published widely on the topic including the outcomes of intratympanic tretaments for the condition and has been recently involved in developing a national registry for the condition. 

Manohar Bance is an Otologist/Neurotologist and clinician-scientist at Cambridge University, and the inaugural Professor of Otology and Skull Base Surgery at the University of Cambridge, UK. Previously he was Professor and Head of the Division of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Dalhousie University until April 2017, where he was also Director of the EAR and SENSE labs.

Prof. Bance is active in all aspects of ear and skull base surgery, particularly recently in cochlear and auditory implants, and hearing restoration biotechnologies. He has held many research grants in these areas. He is the incoming chair for BCIG and is a member of numerous international societies. Prof Bance has published 215 papers to date, as well as 12 book chapters, and is on many editorial boards.

Karolina Kluk is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Manchester and is an expert in psychoacoustics and electrophysiology of hearing impairment. She completed her PhD in psychoacoustics at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Professor Brian CJ Moore. She was awarded the Pauline Ashley Prize from Deafness Research UK, which allowed her to gain experience of electrophysiological techniques for human auditory research at the Evoked Response Laboratory of Professor Terry Picton at the University of Toronto. Her research falls within two core themes that can be classified as auditory neuroscience (fundamental research relating to the basic auditory function and cross-interaction between auditory and vestibular systems) and translational hearing science (applied translational research focused on objective hearing-function assessment). Her work is funded by research grants from a variety of sources including the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Wellcome Trust, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), charities and international industries. She is an Associate Lead for Optimised Hearing Assessment Theme of Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and a Hearing Health Lead within Rapid Translation Incubator of BRC. 

Prof. Gürkov is an Otolaryngologist practicing and teaching in Munich, Germany.

His clinical and scientific focus has been on Neurotology, both diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, and especially the field of Meniere's Disease, including 3 randomized controlled trials with 3 different treatment modalities.

His group introduced clinical imaging of endolymphatic hydrops in Europe in the late 2000s and has since then conducted numerous studies on the correlations between clinical features and functional test results.