I am a professional astronomer based in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics, affiliated with the discipline of Bioinformatics, and have been in this position since 2009 when the University re-deployed me from my original lecturing post in the Department of Information Technology. Between 2011 and 2016 on leave from Galway I was appointed Associate Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as well as at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Yeshiva University, both located in New York City. Whilst there I was in active in a number of areas, particularly in radiobiology, where I lead a very interesting project to determine the subtle changes in the concentrations of microbial derived metabolites in blood plasma as a consequence of radiation exposure, as well as studying the role of endogenous retroviruses in human evolution.
Outside of my teaching duties for the School of Maths’ M.Sc. programmes in Biomedical Genomics and Computational Genomics, I am involved in contributing radiobiological expertise to the University’s very successful M.Sc. in Medical Physics, that is run in cooperation between colleagues in the School of Physics, and clinicians in Galway University Hospital.
I am involved in several astronomical collaborations with colleagues in the UK, USA and South Africa. I also hold two funding awards from the Environmental Protection Agency based around the use of Earth Observation satellites to study surface and groundwater bodies in Ireland remotely. I am a member of the Ryan Institute as a funded Principal Investigator.