Niamh is a lecturer in the Department of Physiology and Medical Physics. She received a B.E in Electronic Engineering from UCD in 2004. After working in the telecommunications industry and subsequently travelling the world, Niamh returned to Ireland and obtained an MSc in Biomedical Science from NUI Galway in 2009. She completed her PhD at RCSI, where she combined experimental and computational techniques to explore bioenergetic dysfunction in neuronal excitotoxicity. Her post-doctoral studies expanded this work to investigate mitochondrial bioenergetic dysfunction in Alzheimer’s.
Niamh continues to pursue an interdisciplinary approach in her current research, including primary cultures, multi-‘omics, microscopy, biochemical studies, and systems modelling. More recently, she has been applying single cell and spatial multi-omics techniques to investigate cell type-specific aspects of neurodegeneration. Her work contributes to several collaborative projects investigating mechanisms of mitochondrial and bioenergetic dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases, with a particular interest in metabolic dysfunction in Parkinson’s.
Niamh has co-supervised three PhD students and two MSc students, and is currently supervising three PhD students (Carmen Stepek: spatial ‘omics profiling of Parkinson’s brain tissue; Javier Villegas Salmeron: single-cell profiling of epilepsy brain tissue; Hannah Nyarko: spatial ‘omics profiling of breast cancer tissue) and a research assistant (Sandeep Chenna: mathematical modelling of neuronal metabolism/bioenergetics in Parkinson’s).
As well as her scientific publications (http://bit.ly/2fy5EGt), Niamh hosts public seminars on Parkinson’s research in Ireland (https://www.pdmitoquant.eu/general-public/videos/). She has also written an online article analysing the benefits of doubt in scientific research (2013: http://bit.ly/2eSrwLk), and her career story is listed on the SFI’s Smart Futures website (2016: https://bit.ly/3pRBVgU).
