Rate My Professor Philip Bird

Professor Philip Bird is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Surgery and Critical Care at the University of Otago, Christchurch, within the Faculty of Medicine. An otolaryngologist with a special interest in otology and neurotology, he obtained his MB ChB from the University of Otago School of Medicine in 1987 and Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (FRACS) in Otolaryngology in 1995. His career began as a house surgeon in Wellington from 1987 to 1990, followed by advanced training in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Wellington Hospital and Christchurch Hospital from 1991 to 1995. He then completed a fellowship in Otology and Neurotology at the University of Miami School of Medicine from 1996 to 1998. Currently, he practices as an otolaryngologist at Christchurch Public Hospital and in private practice, serves as a surgeon for the Southern Cochlear Implant Programme, and acts as a visiting neurotologist at Wellington Hospital. He convenes the Otolaryngology module for the 5th year undergraduate medical student teaching programme in Orthopaedics and Advanced Medicine and teaches in the audiology section of the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Canterbury.

Promoted to Clinical Professor in December 2025, Professor Bird's research interests encompass the delivery of corticosteroids and therapeutic substances to the inner ear, outcomes research in cochlear implantation including equity of access, and inner ear effects of middle ear procedures. Notable publications include 'A New Theory for Ménière’s Disease: Detached Saccular Otoconia' (Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, 2017), 'Aotearoa New Zealand cochlear implant programmes equity audit: Addressing disparities and equity for Māori with severe and profound hearing loss' (New Zealand Medical Journal, 2025, with P. Tuohy et al.), 'Imaging Case Study of the Month-Conductive Hearing Loss From Bone Dust Deposition After Temporal Bone Surgery' (2025), 'Plasticity of the auditory cortex and brainstem in surgically induced unilaterally deaf adult humans with and without tinnitus' (Clinical Neurophysiology, 2025, with M. Park et al.), and 'Classification of cochlear implant complications using a modified Clavien-Dindo classification' (Cochlear Implants International, 2022). His 61 publications have accumulated 1,162 citations.