I am currently working as an HRB postdoctoral fellow in Professor Geraldine Butler's lab. I graduated with a Bachelors degree in biology from NUI Maynooth in the year 2000.

I subsequently embarked on a PhD in bioinformatics in the lab of Dr James McInerney. My research led to the discovery of positive selection on a protein that is essential for bacterial cell viability (OMP85) and also proteins that are potential meningitides vaccine targets. I have also worked on bacterial phylogenies and recently published an alpha proteobacterial supertree and subsequently inferred the origin of the eukaryote mitochondrion. I received the doctoral prize of achievement at NUI Maynooth in 2005.

After my PhD studies I spent just over a year in the lab of Professor Ann Burnell working on genes involved in nematode chemoreception and nematode phylogenetics.

I moved to the Conway Institute in October 2005 and I am currently undertaking a comparative genomic study of pathogenic Candida species with special reference to Candida parapsilosis. We have just completed a phylogenomic analysis of 42 fungal genomes.