Profile

I’m from Kildare originally but live in Dublin.  I also lived in Limerick for 12 years before moving to Dublin.

I love the gym and reading books. I recently bought a PS5 and have started to get back into gaming! I’m currently playing Uncharted 3 and Helldivers 2.

I’m an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in DCU. I did my Bachelors in Aeronautical Engineering in University of Limerick and then stayed there to do a PhD in a different topic – microfluidics.

An Assistant Professor has two main parts to the job. The first is lecturing – so I teach students, set and mark their exam papers, and meet with them to give them advice.

The other part is research. This involves working in the lab and supervising PhD students. My research is in microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip. This is where we try to convert all the things a scientist does in the lab and miniaturise and automate it onto a tiny device about the size of a credit card. A great example of this is COVID-19 antigen tests – these are a type of lab-on-a-chip called a ‘lateral flow test’. I work on a different sort of lab-on-a-chip called ‘lab-on-a-disc’. I actually build chips that look like DVDs and spin them to move liquids from the centre of the disc to the edges of the disc!

Every day is different and I really like that. I usually arrive at 9am and some days I have to lecture students, some days I work in the lab, and some days I have lots of meetings. I usually have coffee a lot with my friends and leave at 530 to go to the gym. Sometimes I have to travel. In the last year I’ve gone to Poland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands to share the results of my lab experiments! Travelling for work is always fun!

I think I’d buy a VR headset for students to use during our university engineer’s week and open days! VR is becoming super important in engineering as its a way for people to learn how to fix machines – instead of reading a manual or looking up the internet the instructions of what dial to adjust or what wire to check will appear in front of you!