Professor Róisín Owens
Academic Non-Executive Director
Róisín is Professor of Bioelectronics at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. She received her BA in Natural Sciences (Mod. Biochemistry) at Trinity College Dublin, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Southampton University. She carried out two postdoc fellowships at Cornell University, on host-pathogen interactions of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the dept. of Microbiology and Immunology with Professor David Russell, and on rhinovirus therapeutics in the dept. of Biomedical Engineering with Professor Moonsoo Jin. From 2009-2017 she was a group leader in the dept. of bioelectronics at Ecole des Mines de St. Etienne, on the microelectronics campus in Provence. Her current research centres on application of organic electronic materials for monitoring biological systems in vitro, with a specific interest in studying the gut-brain-microbiome axis.
Róisín has received several awards including the European Research Council starting (2011), proof of concept grant (2014) and consolidator (2016) grants, a Marie Curie fellowship, and an EMBO fellowship. From 2014, she was principal editor for biomaterials for MRS communications (Cambridge University Press), and she serves on the advisory board of Advanced BioSystems and Journal of Applied Polymer Science (Wiley). She became Scientific Editor of Materials Horizons (Royal Society of Chemistry) in 2020 and is a 2019 laureate of the Suffrage Science Award. She is author of 80+ publications.