Profile

I am from Mayo but am living in Cork city where I am a PhD scientist with University College Cork and the INFANT Centre. My research looks at how the brain grows in the first two years of life. I look at how your life at home and in the outside world helps your brain grow.

I play Ladies football with Bishopstown GAA club and I also help coach the u14’s team. I am a big supporter of Mayo GAA and have been going to their games since I was little!

I also love to read and Harry Potter books are one of my favorites. I love traveling and have visited Italy, France, Scotland, and England. I am going to Paris at the end of October to talk about my research.

I work with the Infant Centre in Cork http://www.infantcentre.ie/

Since the start of my PhD I have been reading papers from other scientists so that I know everything there is about my research. I have also written a paper and will be talking about this paper in Paris at the end of October.

Very soon, I will start the main section of my PhD where 18 month old toddlers will be visiting me for an eye-tracking assessment. I will be showing them pictures and videos on a computer screen and a little black box (shown below) that is placed under the computer screen records the eye-movements of the toddler.

Some of these toddlers will have been born prematurely (which means they were born too early) and others will have been born at the right time which is known as term birth. We are going to see if the eye-tracking shows us any differences in the way the brain of a premature baby grows when we compare it to the brain of a baby born at term.

Right now, I have no eye-tracking visits, so my days are mostly spent at my desk answering emails, reading papers, and planning on how to write my thesis (a big book of all my work that I have to give to the college at the end of my PhD). I will also have to meet with everyone else on my team to make sure we are all working together so that we are ready for the eye-tracking visits when they start. When I get a break, I will head for lunch with some of the other PhDs that work in INFANT.

I am also practicing every day for the talk I have to give in Paris. It is my first big talk and I am very nervous! Keep your fingers crossed for me, please!

When I can, I make sure to go to schools to talk to them about the brain and I go to different events to help people understand what we do at the infant centre. Here is a picture of me at the ploughing championships last year with two of the girls I work with!

I also try to go to conferences that are close to home so that I can continue to learn new things from other scientists. Here I am with other PhD students from the INFANT centre at a conference in Killarney last year!