Roger Thornton Dean (born in 1948 in the UK) is a British-Australian musician, academic, biochemist and cognitive scientist. Alongside his academic research, he is always a composer/improviser, having worked with many key participants on the European and Australian new music and improvisation scenes, and being deeply involved in electroacoustic music. He founded the ensemble LYSIS in the UK and 1970, and it became austraLYSIS when he moved to Australia in 1988, and continues there still. He is married to poet, writer, musician and academic Hazel Smith, and was educated in the UK at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he gained his bachelors and first doctorate. While researching in biochemistry, he became in Australia the foundation Director of the Heart Research Institute, Sydney (1988-2002), and then the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra (2002-2007). Moving his research and other activities closer towards his musical creative work, since 2007 he has been a research professor of sonic communication at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University.
