Academic biography

I have been working in the field of bioinformatics since 2007, having spent time in academic, public and private sectors. I completed my PhD in bioinformatics in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. Aoife McLysaght in The Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin. I then moved to Cambridge to work for the Ensembl project in both The Wellcome Sanger Institute and The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), where I annotated vertebrate genomes, defining the reference gene sets for several different species. In 2017 I returned to Dublin to take up a role in The Mater Hospital as a clinical bioinformatician, specialising in diagnostics and rare diseases. I then spent a couple of years as the Head of Genomics for an Irish MedTech startup company. From 2023 to 2025 I was a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Bioinformatics in UCD as part of the Guangzhou Dublin International College (GDIC) initiative, which involved spending a semester each year teaching bioinformatics and scientific communication in South China Agricultural University (SCAU) in Guangzhou, China. I have been an Assistant Professor in Computational Biology in the School of Biotechnology DCU since October 2025. 

Employment history:
2025 - present: Assistant Professor in Computational Biology, School of Biotechnology, DCU.
2023 - 2025: Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Bioinformatics, School of Biology and Environmental Science, UCD.
2021 - 2023: Head of Genomics, Akkure Genomics, NexusUCD.
2018 - 2021: Clinical Bioinformatician and Information Scientist, Mater Misericordiae University Hospital.
2017 - 2018: Medical Writer, National Rare Diseases Office (NRDO), Mater Misericordiae University Hospital.
2014 - 2017: Senior Software Engineer, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Hinxton, UK.
2013 - 2014: Senior Bioinformatician, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK.

Education: