Dr Dearbhaile Dooley

Dr Dearbhaile Dooley leads a pre-clinical spinal cord injury (SCI) research group based at University College Dublin, Ireland. Using both in vitro and in vivo approaches, her lab aims to identify, validate and specifically target key factors involved in the beneficial aspect of the SCI inflammatory response to provide a more favourable environment for functional recovery. In the last two years, Dearbhaile has secured >€500,000 in independent funding and she has also established the first SCI rodent model at UCD.

After performing undergraduate and postgraduate research in the field of SCI between Ireland and Belgium from 2010-2016, in 2017 Dr Dooley started an independent SCI research lab at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. Using both in vitro and in vivo approaches, the lab aims to identify, validate and specifically target key factors involved in the beneficial aspect of the SCI inflammatory response to provide a more favourable environment for functional recovery. Dr Dooley hopes to take advantage of the exchange of knowledge and to build relationships with other global SCI researchers at the 2021 ISCoS meeting. As an early career researcher, it is particularly important to foster effective collaborations, particularly in the rapidly evolving field of neuroinflammation.

Dr Dooley and her team received a 2021 SCI Collaboration Grant to attend ISCoS 2021:Virtual. The team comprises:

• Dr Dearbhaile Dooley, Researcher, School of Medicine, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Ciara Walsh, PhD candidate, School of Medicine, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Dr James Reynolds, Researcher, University College Dublin, Ireland

L-R: Dearbhaile Dooley, Ciara Walsh, James Reynolds

The research group share their experiences from the conference.

“My team and I were delighted to be able to attend this year’s ISCoS meeting as it was the first time we were able to do so given the virtual format and support from the SRI grant. As an emerging spinal cord injury (SCI)  research group, this was particularly useful as the travel distance in the past usually made it unfeasible to attend. My group particularly enjoyed talks from Dr. Charles Tator, Prof. Simone Di Giovanni, Prof. Michael Fehlings and Prof. Martin Schwab as these provided an excellent overview of basic science and current treatment approaches arising from their research; which I have been following closely for >10 years. As we are a basic science research groups, these key talks and associated oral and poster sessions were particularly interesting. We found it very useful that there were also many ‘Lived Experience’ talks, which are often not included in basic science SCI conferences and this was a new addition to my conference experience.”