Meet Dr James Fielding, our 2021 UQ Alumni Award winner

16 Sep 2021

Business graduate, Dr James Fielding, has been recognised for his entrepreneurial leadership and service to UQ Ventures in the 2021 UQ Alumni Awards.

Meet Dr James Fielding

Distinguished Young Alumni Award for entrepreneurial leadership and service to UQ Ventures

Dr James Fielding is the Founder and CEO of Audeara, Founder and Director of Robotics Engineering Research Laboratories, Founder and Director of Yumm! Confectionary and Founder and former Director of Field Orthopaedics. He worked in a range of fields before pursuing medicine. Dr Fielding was based at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital before leaving full time clinical medicine to focus on the founding and development of his start-up, Audeara. Audeara headphones are the world’s first full-fidelity headphones with a built-in hearing test. The company has grown from a small, crowdfunded project in 2017 to a publicly listed company valued at $21M in 2021.

James Fielding
Dr James Fielding; Bachelor of Business Management 2010, Bachelor of Science 2010, Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery 2014, Graduate Certificate in Executive Leadership 2014

About UQ Ventures

UQ Ventures is the UQ community hub for entrepreneurship. Students and young alumni (graduated in last 10 years) connect, share learnings, practice pitches, get mentored, create, seek funding and find courses through UQ Ventures. UQ Ventures also runs programs for high school students and provides a vehicle for industry wanting to pursue innovation and entrepreneurship in partnership with us.

Favourite place on campus

Wordies Café – it’s where I met my wife.

Hearing the difference

We originally set out to make a medical device to perform hearing tests on people in a simple and effective way that would increase the availability and utilisation of hearing tests. Realising the capability of the platform we’d built, we became passionate about giving people an incredible sound experience regardless of their hearing health. Hearing aids focus on the spoken word but don’t offer a truly rich sound experience. By offering this enhanced and personalised hearing profile we can use entertainment as the hook to inform people about the importance of their hearing.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A concierge, I thought it would be cool to be the person that can get anything and have your finger on the pulse, Michael J Fox style.

Did you have a lightbulb moment during your degree that guided you on your career path?

My career path is slightly curvy and I was at UQ for 10 years, but during that time I was working in a hedge fund in New York choosing what I was going to nibble on for afternoon tea from the extensive office menu while my wife was working at the Brooklyn District Attorney Special Victims Unit bringing her own pencils and trying to stop cruelty and injustice. I realised I wasn’t in the right place and I came home to study Medicine.

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