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.
