About us People & groups

I studied zoology as the main component of a science degree (BA) in Trinity College, Dublin from 1998-2002. My thesis was a behavioral study of feeding preferences in domestic chickens. My postgraduate projects in the field of zoology included a study of cichlid speciation in the african great lakes and a turtle conservation program in the Dutch Antilles. I was awarded a 4-year Wellcome Trust scholarship in 2005, which encompassed an MSc in bioinformatics at Imperial College and a PhD in its Department of Immunology. For my PhD, I examined the host response to the retrovirus HTLV-I. Specifically, I used a variety of computational, modeling and statistical approaches to better understand why certain individuals remain asymptomatic during HTLV-I infection. My interests lie in the application of computational and mathematical techniques to biological questions, specifically in the subject of disease and drug discovery. I am currently researching the role of endocytosis in signal transduction pathways as part of an EIPOD fellowship in collaboration with the Schultz and Krijgsveld groups in EMBL-Heidelberg.