Research Group
Current and former PhD and MSc researchers
Current PhD Students
- Alan Kamara (2026–present; co-supervised with Brendan Murphy)
- Thesis topic: “Exploring the role of Mitonuclear Discordance in Parkinson’s Disease”
- Funded by the Rinn Centre for Artificial Intelligence
- Joshua Musau (2026–present; co-supervised with Brendan Murphy)
- Thesis topic: “Social media sentiment analysis for severe weather warnings verification”
- Funded by the AIMSIR Centre
- Kseniia Maksimova (2022–2026; co-supervised with Emmeline Hill)
- Thesis topic: “Novel population genomics approaches for trait mapping using the Thoroughbred horse model”
- Funded by Genomics Data Science, SFI Centre for Research Training
Former PhD Students
- Dr. Prabhleen Kaur (2019–2024; co-supervised with Simone Ciuti)
- Thesis: “Social Network Analysis of Animal Social Networks: robustness and methods”
- Funded by Foundations of Data Science, SFI Centre for Research Training
- Subsequent role: Data Scientist at Microsoft
- Dr. Kim Conteddu (2021–2024; primary supervisor Simone Ciuti)
- Thesis: “Modelling the effect of human pressures on wildlife social-networks to improve our understanding of multispecies disease transmission”
- Funded by Foundations of Data Science, SFI Centre for Research Training
- Subsequent role: Manager Statistician at Bristol Myers Squibb
- Dr. Jinbo Zhao (2017–2023; co-supervised with Adrian O’Hagan)
- Thesis: “Statistical Genetics Models with Actuarial Applications”
- Funded by Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics
- Subsequent role: Clinical Research Tutor in Biostatistics, UCD School of Medicine
- Dr. Catherine Mahoney (2019–2023; primary supervisor Denis Shields)
- Thesis: “Discovering genomic regions enriched for de novo recombination events”
- Funded by IRC Enterprise Partnership, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology
- Subsequent role: Associate Director, Digital Diagnostics and AI at AstraZeneca
- Dr. James Ward (2019–2023; primary supervisor David MacHugh)
- Thesis: “High resolution functional population genomics of modern, historical and ancient cattle (Bos spp.)”
- Funded by Genomics Data Science, SFI Centre for Research Training
- Subsequent role: Postdoctoral Researcher, Population Genomics Group (Prof. Medugorac), LMU Munich, Germany
- Dr. Chiara Cotroneo (2017–2020; primary supervisor Denis Shields)
- Thesis: “Identification of chromosomal clusters of protein domain coding regions in Bacteria and Archaea”
- Funded by the Wellcome Trust (Computational Infection Biology)
- Subsequent role: Senior Data Scientist | ML Engineer at Bolt
MSc Supervision
I have supervised MSc dissertation projects across the following taught graduate programmes:
- MSc in Statistical Data Science, University College Dublin
- MSc in Statistics, University College Dublin (2017–present)
- MSc in Data and Computational Science, University College Dublin (2017–present)
- MSc in Actuarial Science, University College Dublin
- MSc in Applied Statistics, University of Oxford (2014, 2016)