Dr Dean Freestone

Chief Executive Officer

Dr Dean Freestone has devoted his career to neural engineering. The beginning of this journey started in 2003 at La Trobe University where Dean became dux of his year and got a scholarship to study a PhD at the University of Melbourne. There he researched data science, machine learning clinical research. Dean finished his PhD in 2012, submitting a thesis on ‘Seizure Forecasting and Reverse Engineering the Brain’, an exploration on how to use engineering methods to better understand the brain and epilepsy, and then went on to work in the Neural Statistics Lab at Columbia University in New York and then back to Australia in 2015 to work at the Department of Medicine at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne.

Dean has a long-term track record of excellence has won a collection of prestigious awards throughout his career including best engineering graduate for his degree at La Trobe University, best PhD in Engineering at the University of Melbourne, the University-wide Chancellor’s Prize for best PhD, and the highly prestigious Victorian Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellowship at Columbia University. Between these accomplishments and a passion for helping people with epilepsy, Dean has quickly risen to be a leader in the global epilepsy and neural engineering research and development field.

In 2017 in a small office at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dean co-founded Seer with Mark Cook, and George Kenley. Along with the co-founders and an ever growing team, Seer has been awarded millions of dollars in grants and become a nation-wide epilepsy diagnostic service that is now poised to expand internationally.

Credentials

Positions

Board member
Seer Medical

Education

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computational Neuroscience, University of Melbourne

Bachelor of Engineering (Honours), Electrical and Electronics Engineering, La Trobe University

Honours and Awards

Fullbright Postdoctoral Scholar, Australia

Chancellor’s Prize for PhD Excellence, University of Melbourne

John Melvin Memorial Prize for Best PhD Thesis in Engineering, University of Melbourne