Dr Brona Murphy is a senior lecturer in the Department of Physiology & Medical Physics and principal investigator within the Centre for Systems Medicine in the same department. She received her B.Sc. in Biotechnology from NUI, Galway in 2000.

She then studied in Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Prof Seamus Martin and received her PhD in 2004. Her thesis research examined apoptosis-associated caspase activation events. Upon moving to the RCSI, she was awarded a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Health Research Board to study the regulation of apoptotic pathways in the epileptic brain. Her research was conducted between laboratories in the RCSI and the Dow Neurobiology Lab, Legacy Research Centre, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Upon her return to Ireland, Dr Murphy was awarded a Stokes Lectureship from Science Foundation Ireland and began working as an independent PI. The focus of Dr Murphy’s research is to gain a better understanding of how brain tumours resist cell death upon treatment. Her group examines cell death pathways at the molecular level, in both adult and paediatric brain tumours, with the overall aim of increasing the susceptibility of these tumours to death. Dr Murphy hopes that by elucidating and targeting cell death pathways in these tumours, current and future therapies will be more effective, and ultimately patient survival will improve.

Her group’s research is funded by grants from the RCSI, HRB, SFI, H2020 Framework Programme and the NCRC.

Link to RCSI