Publications

Professor Peter McHugh is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NUI Galway. He holds a BE in Mechanical Engineering from UCG (1987), and an MSc (1990) and PhD (1992) in Mechanics of Solids from Brown University, Providence, USA. He joined NUI Galway in 1991, where he is currently the Established Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Dean of the College of Engineering and Informatics. He is Director of the Biomechanics Research Centre (BMEC). He has a significant publication record, with 137 refereed journal publications, 10 book chapters and over 300 conference publications. He has supervised to completion 24 PhD and 23 research masters students. He has generated over €11m in research funding from national, EU and industry sources, and has active research collaborations with international leaders in the field, spanning Europe and the USA. He has received numerous awards, including membership of the Royal Irish Academy, Ireland’s national academy for the sciences and humanities (2011), the Silver Medal of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland (Section of Bioengineering) in 2011, the Presidential Nominee Fellowship of Engineers Ireland in (2009), and the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (1995). He currently holds the position of Secretary for Policy and International Relations of the Royal Irish Academy.

Professor Laoise McNamara is a Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Ireland Galway and the Program Director for the Masters in Biomedical Engineering (MSc). She holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Trinity College Dublin and a 1st class Honours degree in Mechanical Engineering from NUI Galway. She completed Postdoctoral training at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, USA. From 2007-2009 she was a Lecturer in Mechanobiology and Musculoskeletal Biomechanics at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. She was appointed to NUI Galway in 2009 as a Science Foundation Stokes Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering. She established the Mechanobiology and Medical Device Research group (MMDRG, www.mechanobiology.ie) at NUI Galway. Her research has been widely published and cited, and has attracted significant research funding (€3,620,285), most notably the ERC Starting Independent Researcher Award (€1,499,910) in 2011 and a Science Foundation Ireland Investigators Grant (€883,257). She has interdisciplinary research collaborations with researchers at Georgia Tech, Notre Dame University, City College of New York, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Tampere University of Technology, INSERM Nantes and the University of Southampton. She collaborates with Stryker, Boston Scientific and Medtronic.

Professor Abhay Pandit is the Established Professor in Biomaterials. He is the Director of a Science Foundation Ireland funded Centre for Research in Medical Devices (CÚRAM) at the the National University of Ireland, Galway. He obtained a PhD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where his postgraduate work focussed on the modification of a fibrin scaffold to deliver a therapeutic biomolecule and resulted in a clinical trial at the Burn Centre. Prof Pandit has over twenty-five years of experience in the field of biomaterials. After a seven-year stint in industry he has worked in academia for the last twelve years. His research is funded by Science Foundation Ireland, the 7th EU Framework programme, Enterprise Ireland, Health Research Board, the AO Foundation and industry sources, and in excess of €78 million. He is the author of 4 patents and has licensed three technologies to medical device companies. He has published more than 180 manuscripts in high-impact factor publications. He was inducted as an International Fellow in Biomaterials Science and Engineering by the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering (IUSBSE). He has been elected as a Council Member of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine and the International Society and European Society for Biomaterials.

Dr Manus Biggs is a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering. He was previously a Science Foundation Ireland Starting Investigator under their SIRG programme. In 2014 Dr Biggs was awarded the UK Society for Biomaterials Larry Hench prize for outstanding contributions to the field of Biomaterials. In 2007 Dr Biggs was awarded the Society for Experimental Biology Young Scientist Award. Dr Biggs has published more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals and filed two patent applications. Dr Biggs has been an Editorial Board Member for European Cells and Materials since 2011 and serves on the board of two grant review panels. He lead a New Foundations Symposium at the World Biomaterials Congress, 2016, Montreal, Canada on “Engineering the Brain-Machine Interface”. Dr Biggs is also a member of the European Society for Biomaterials International Advisory Committee.

Dr. Patrick McGarry is a lecturer in Biomedical Engineering and the Program Director for the Undergraduate Degree in Biomedical Engineering at NUI Galway. Dr. McGarry’s research group has developed an internationally leading reputation in the field of Biomechanics, and in particular computational cell mechanics. Dr McGarry has to date supervised 11 PhD students to completion. He was the primary supervisor of six simultaneous successful PhD completions in October 2012. This achievement is an official record for NUIG. All six students completed in exactly four years (October 2008-October 2012), graduating in March 2013. His PhD students have been awarded numerous international honours and awards (ASME, Engineers Ireland, World Congress of Biomechanics). Dr. McGarry is PI on three major Science Foundation Ireland research grants for Cell Contractility Modelling. His research group has published over 53 papers in leading journals in the field, and presented over 70 research papers at leading international conferences in the field. Dr. McGarry has developed strong collaborations with leading international research groups, including: University of Cambridge; University of California, Santa Barbara; Georgia Institute of Technology; and Rice University.

Dr. Will Ronan is a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering. He completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at NUI Galway (graduating in 2013 and funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology Embark Scholarship) on the mechanics of cells. This research primarily focused on development and implementation of constitutive material models and adhesion models using the finite element method. During this time, he spent one year as a visiting scholar in the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2013, he was awarded a Science Foundation Ireland Short-Term Travel Fellowship which he used to visit the University of Cambridge. This research collaboration expanded on his previous doctoral work to examine the kinetics and mechanics of cell adhesion. In 2014, he began a post-doctoral research project at the Cambridge Centre for Micromechanics on the tensile ductility and toughness of lattice materials & polymer foams. He returned to NUI Galway in 2016, originally as a faculty member in Mechanical Engineering, before moving to his current role in Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Ted Vaughan is a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering. His research focusses on development of multiscale modelling techniques to address problems in biomechanics, mechanobiology, medical device design and composite materials. He graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Limerick in 2007. He was awarded a PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2011, also from the University of Limerick, for research in the area of computational micromechanics of composite materials. Between 2011-2015, he held a position as a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Biomechanics Research (BMEC) here at NUI Galway. During this time, he also held a position as a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Notre Dame, funded through a Postdoctoral Mobility Grant awarded by the Royal Irish Academy. To date, Dr. Vaughan has published approximately thirty peer-reviewed journal articles in internationally-respected journals in the fields of multiscale modelling, computational biomechanics and medical device design. One of these articles is listed as one of the Top-10 most cited articles published in Composites Science and Technology over the past five-years (currently the leading journal in the field of composite materials). He actively collaborates with a range of Industry partners, including Proxy Biomedical, Meotec Gmbh, Boston Scientific and Stryker.