Dr Kellie Dean is a College Lecturer and Principal Investigator in the School of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland. Originally from western Pennsylvania, Kellie graduated with a BSc in Chemistry, minor in Biology, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. After completing her PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher first at the Center for Molecular Biology (ZMBH), University of Heidelberg, Germany, and later with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

At UCC, Kellie leads a research group that is focused on understanding the roles of non-coding RNAs, RNA-binding proteins, RNA-protein complexes in cancer and other human diseases. Her other research interests include translational control, phase separation and disordered proteins. She is a PhD supervisor in the CRT Genomic Data Science programme and the All-Ireland Cancer Research Institute (AICRI). The Dean Lab has been supported by the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI), the Irish Research Council (IRC), Lilly, Breakthrough Cancer Research, the Higher Education Authority, and the Irish Cancer Society.

Internationally, Kellie is an education working group co-leader in the EU COST Action TRANSLACORE (Translational Control in Cancer European Network), a member of the Ribo-seq ORF Consortium and a curator of short-linear motifs for the MoMAP (Motif Map of the Proteome) resource. She is a member of the Irish and European Associations for Cancer Research, the Biochemical Society, and the RNA Society.