Roger Thornton Dean (born 6 September 1948, Manchester UK) is a British-Australian musician, academic, biochemist and cognitive scientist.
[1] He is married to poet, writer, musician and academic Hazel Anne Smith, and was educated in the UK at the Crypt School, Gloucester, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
He was featured in a profile on Collier in the 1985 Channel 4 documentary 'Hoarded Dreams' [3] In Australia, Dean has played keyboards with the Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Watt, and the British tenor Gerald English.
With Hazel Smith, he has created many text and sound works, including Poet without Language, Nuraghic Echoes, The Erotics of Gossip, and The Afterlives of Betsy Scott, all commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
He has worked with many improvisers, including Derek Bailey, Ashley Brown, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, Barry Guy, the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, Ted Curson, Terje Rypdal, John Surman, Tomasz Stańko, and Ken Wheeler.
He then migrated to Australia to become the foundation director of the autonomous Heart Research Institute, in Sydney (1988–2002), and took Australian citizenship in 1992.
From 2002 to 2007 Dean was the Vice–Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra, Australia, and in 2007 he returned to full-time research as Professor of Sonic Communication at the MARCS Auditory Laboratories (now the MARCS Institute), University of Western Sydney, studying music cognition and computational analysis and modelling of music, and computational creativity.
With Graham Collier With LYSIS/austraLYSIS/the austraLYSIS Electroband Music performed by others Electroacoustic pieces Multimedia As pianist in other contexts As bassist