Rate My Professor Hamish Meffin

Associate Professor Hamish Meffin serves in the Department of Biomedical Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Melbourne. He earned his PhD from the University of Sydney and a Bachelor's Degree with Honours from the University of Adelaide. His primary academic interest lies in systems neuroscience, encompassing neuroengineering and computational neuroscience. Meffin's research centers on devising strategies for electrical neural stimulation to convey visual scene information to the brain, contributing to advancements in retinal prostheses and understanding visual processing in the primary visual cortex. He played a key role in Bionic Vision Australia's development of a second-generation retinal prosthesis with 1000 electrodes, enabling face recognition and reading large print by implanting on the inner retinal surface. His background spans mathematics, physics, and neuroscience, with prior experience in theoretical and experimental neuroscience at institutions including the Bionic Ear Institute in Australia and the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience in Germany.

Meffin's career trajectory includes serving as a Senior Researcher in the Victorian Research Laboratory of the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) within the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne, as well as an Honorary Fellow in the same department and at the National Vision Research Institute. He has authored or co-authored 156 publications, accumulating over 2,600 citations. Notable publications include 'Emergence of sparse coding, balance and decorrelation from a biologically-grounded spiking neural network model of learning in the primary visual cortex' (2024), 'Towards a closed loop retinal prosthesis: measuring electrically evoked retinal responses using large electrodes' (2025), 'Modelling Predictive Coding in the Primary Visual Cortex (V1): Layer 2/3 Circuits for Prediction Error Computation through Compartmentalized Spiking Neurons' (2025), 'How Stimulus Statistics Affect the Receptive Fields of Cells in Primary Visual Cortex' (2022, Journal of Neuroscience), and 'Feature selectivity and invariance in marsupial primary visual cortex' (recent). In 2015, he received the inaugural Nicola Family Fund Award from the Australian College of Optometry. His contributions advance neural interfacing technologies and computational models of visual processing.