Expert Commentary and Analysis

Professor James McLaughlin

Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Prof McLaughlin, a physicist and engineer, and a Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Inst. of Physics. He has developed significant initiatives within research, technology transfer, outreach and teaching over these past 39 years. Presently, as a Professor of Bioengineering he is the Director of NIBEC, his salient disciplines address Digital Healthcare Technology and related bio-sensing applications. He is also a Senior Distinguished Research Fellow-2013 and a Senior Impact Fellow-2016 of the University and has held roles including Head of School of Engineering and Research Director.

He was awarded in 2012 an OBE for his services to Research and Economic Development in Northern Ireland, as well a numerous research and innovation awards. In 2022 he was further awarded with a CBE for Research and Education in Northern Ireland.

His present research interests address nanotechnology and it’s application in areas such as point-of-care sensors and cardiology based medical diagnostics. These interests involve the integration of sensors, microfluidics, electronics and photonics.

Professor McLaughlin has attracted over £100m of funding to establish research that has led to the establishment of the ECME, Biodevices Lab, CHIC, NIBEC, NICAM, NanotecNI and BEST. These centres have now led to a vibrant research institute (ERI) with over eighty researchers carrying out both basic and applied research in topics.

He has attained in excess of 400 publications (H index 52) and he has been honoured as an invited speaker at over 60 International Conferences and he has attracted over £70M of high quality funding from bodies such as EPSRC, Wellcome Trust, EU, NSF, DOH, DEL, HEA, Leverhulme Trust, RDA’s, Royal Soc., DoE; as well as industry.

In recent years his over-arching strategy is to develop a strong Digital Health Technology Platform within Northern Ireland and the EU. This work involves linking bioengineering and computing sciences with sensor technology developed within NIBEC and thus facilitating clinically-led research initiatives to benefit the healthcare sector. Affiliated Centres have now been set up including £9M CHIC, £8M ECME, £6M Biodevices Lab, £1.5M CACR; Integrated Diagnostics Lab., and the Eng-Comp Digital Twin Hub. Current initiatives include leading the set-up of a new £43M Belfast City Deal- Centre for Digital Healthcare Technology-CDHT as well as PI of a new EPSRC DHTA and Co-I of an £11M EPSRC Digital Health Centre for Doctoral Training Centre.

Professor McLaughlin has led key developments in the technology of sensor materials and it’s impact into the health technology industry in areas such as cardiac arrest, heart failure and ubiquitous predictive monitoring. This work has had a strong influence on the Universities commercialisation of IP relating to Digital Healthcare Technology companies in NI, as well as providing the basis for a range of new biomedical sensing platforms.

He is the co-founder and CTO of Intelesens Ltd. (formerly ST&D Ltd. and now sold to Ultralinq) which specialises in the design and fabrication of wireless vital-signs monitoring systems, as well as incorporating new micro- and nano-scale technologies, thus enabling the miniaturisation and integration of low-cost medical device systems. He was a Director with SiSAF (Director 2014-2018; Chief Scientific Officer (2015-2017) and is currently a Director (and helped set-up) with the European Connected Health Campus/Alliance (Chair 2009-2011). Consultancies and expert roles led to the initial phases of Heartsine (now Stryker) and Heartscape (now Roper).

Notable recent achievements include leading a 2017 Qualcomm Xprize Tricorder Team to joint third place (out of 380); 2017 Healthcare NI Innovation Award; Distinguished Research (2013) and Impact (2016) Awards etc. and a Life Savers Recognition from MadeinUni in 2021.

Responsibilities

Professor McLaughlin is a Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and he represents the University on panels such as; RAE 2008 Metallurgy and Materials Assessment Panel; Northern Ireland Industry and Science Panel (MATRIX); NanoIreland Task Force/Chairs the Nanomaterials Panel; US Ireland R&D Partnership; Advisory panel to MSSI; co-chair of the 2014 NI Matrix Life and Health Science Strategy Expert Panel; TechStart 2014 Advisory committee; Innovate KTN Health Technology Advisory Board as well as numerous local organisations. He is currently a board member of ECHA; IUL Ltd and NIACE Ltd. He is a member of the numerous advisory boards including COST Action; CRANN (2012-2016); NanoCDT (2012-2021); NIACE etc. He is also a Trustee of the Heart Trust Fund NI

He is also a well-known conference organiser; and has membership of a range of International Conference Committees.

He is also responsible for teaching Advanced Medical Sensors, Biomedical Physics and Bio-Instrumentation and qualifying numerous undergraduate and postgraduate students including over 40 PhD students to date.

Professor Tara Moore

Professor of Personalised Medicine

Tara Moore, Professor of Personalised Medicine, concurrently  holds a chair at Ulster University in Northern Ireland and is Chief R&D Officer for Avellino Labs in Menlo Park San Francisco USA

Subsequent to her return home to Northern Ireland from Research fellowship training in Harvard Medical School, Tara has undertaken research sabbaticals in Mount Sinai Hospital New York, Dundee Wellcome Trust Laboratories and The Stem Cell Institute in University of Modena and Reggio. As a result of intensive training to obtain skills and expertise Tara has a wealth of experience of working in Universities and industrial  laboratories  focusing on development of partner diagnostics and treatment for genetic eye disease.

Tara’s research team concentrates on identifying genes which cause disease and in developing gene editing and gene silencing treatments for autosomal dominantly inherited eye diseases. Her work is disseminated worldwide through her contribution to guest lectures and workshops and internationally co authored peer reviewed publications. Tara has contributed to numerous text books and authored over 120 peer reviewed  publications in high impact peer reviewed journals reflecting internationally competitive research of high quality - 1981 total citations, generating an h-index of 23 and i10-index of 38.

The culmination of Tara’s contribution to health, well-being and safety and improving people’s lives whilst inspiring others to see the opportunities to make a difference through science was recognised with the prestigious WISE award presented by HRH Princess Anne and a prestigious Winston Churchill Fellowship.

Tara is a Fellow of Royal Society of Biology, UK, Royal Society of Arts, UK, Royal Society of Medicine, UK, Senior Associate of Royal Society of Medicine and Honorary Fellow of Royal College of Physicians (London) FRCP, FFLM. She is also expert reviewer for numerous peer reviewed journals and editor/academic editor for a number of the top peer reviewed journals. She is an expert reviewer for Athena Swan, the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme for HEA and numerous funding bodies including MRC and Wellcome Trust. Tara represents Northern Ireland  on the UKRI Strengths in Places panel  for the distribution of research and innovation funding to support significant regional growth.

Tara is a member of various stakeholder boards and committees including but not limited to Healthcare Advisory Board; Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO); Leadership Committee Northern Ireland Genomic Medicine Centre (part of MRC NIGMC 100,000 Genomes England), The Royal College of Ophthalmologists Standards Committee, Education & Training in GP Stakeholder Group and Policy Forum for Northern Ireland, to name a few.

Tara is a mentor for the New York Academy of Science 1000Girls, 1000Futures initiative from the Global Stem Alliance.

The research laboratory Tara leads excels in training research students. It is of note that PhD students supervised by Tara were awarded the University’s John Scott Convocation Award for best Post Graduate student, for three consecutive PhD graduates. Her PhD student was also awarded thesis of the year award and destination of employment of staff and students trained in Tara’s laboratory spans Harvard Medical School, Duke University and many other prestigious research laboratories worldwide. Tara  also provides free training and education to surgeons in Peru and has undertaken charitable trips to remote locations including the Amazon Jungle to facilitate eye surgery and research into eye diseases specific to those locations.

Tara’s commitment to education is equal to that of her passion for advancing medical research

Tara spearheaded the development of the first ever university training programme for Physician Associate profession for Northern Ireland. Integrating it successfully into both primary and secondary care and obtained millions of pounds worth of funding from the Department of Health, Northern Ireland to ensure sustainable ability. The first PAs have now taken up post in Northern Ireland across all the Health and Social Care Trusts.

Tara is also founder of the only Royal College of Ophthalmologists endorsed and co-badged Pg Diploma in Cataract and Refractive Surgery. This course has now ensured many hundreds of eye surgeons worldwide are educated to the highest of standards in preparation  for both laser and lens extraction eye surgery.

Tara also founded the first online training programme for Forensic Medical Officers involved at the front line of child sexual abuse.  The long standing success of this educational initiative  resulted in nomination and election of Tara to Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine Royal College of Physicians (RCP) – the highest accolade this organisation can bestow on an individual.

As a result of her unique combined expertise and knowledge in genetics, molecular biology and Ophthalmology, Tara was appointed to the position of Chief of Research and innovation for USA based international genetic Ophthalmology specialist company Avellino Labs.

Tara currently holds both her University chair in UK and her industrial position in USA

Most recently Tara was nominated and voted as a double awardee for the Ophthalmologist’s Power List 2019 categories of Emerging Leaders and Inventors.

Outside work Tara is mother to seven children and a mediocre polo player!

Professor Raymond Bond

Professor of Human Computer Systems

Raymond has research interests within human-computer systems which has mainly included applications of biomedical and healthcare informatics (digital health). Raymond's work has involved the application of human-computer interaction and data science/machine learning techniques to healthcare research. His work has involved health data analytics as well as the modelling, processing and visualisation of medical data to enhance clinical decision-making, including the creation of interactive decision support systems. He also has research interests in computerised simulation-based training in healthcare, usability engineering/UX data analysis methods to improve medical devices, eye-gaze analytics in clinical decision making, and is also involved in designing and evaluating digital health and wellbeing interventions. Raymond has over 350 research outputs and has chaired/co-chaired a number of conferences: 1) 32nd International BCS Human Computer Interaction conference, 2) the 45th/ 46th Annual Conference of the International Society for Computerised Electrocardiology, and 3) the 31st Annual European Conference of Cognitive Ergonomics).

Raymond initiated a UX-Lab which is an outlet for transferring usability engineering knowledge to the medical device industry and other industries. Raymond has been a grant holder on research projects funded by EPSRC, ESRC, HSC, FP7, H2020, InvestNI, Samaritans Ireland, Innovate UK, Higher Education Academy, InterTrade Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy.

Raymond obtained his BSc(hons) and PhD in the School of Computing and Mathematics (Ulster University). He is a senior fellow of the UK higher education academy. Before academia, he worked in the web industry and later held Research Associate positions in the subject areas of Connected Health and Computerised Electrocardiography. He also coordinated the Computing and Engineering Professional Education Centre for Northern Ireland (CEPEC-NI) where he managed computing science related outreach activities and summer schools.

Professor Maurice Mulvenna

Professor of Computer Science

Maurice Mulvenna BSc. (Hons), PgCert, MPhil, PhD, FHEA is Professor of Computer Science at Ulster University. Maurice’s research areas include artificial intelligence; data analytics; mental health and wellbeing data analysis; and assistive technologies. His most recent research focuses on working in partnership with mental health organisations, using artificial intelligence to uncover useful behavioural patterns in anonymised call and event data pertaining to crisis helplines, chatlines and suicidal behaviour in public places.

He has served on 250 program committees and chaired several conferences, including the 32nd British Human-Computer Interaction conference in 2018, 31st European Cognitive Ergonomics Conference in 2019, the 5th IEEE International Conference on Internet of People in 2019 and the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health in 2021-2024.

He has also presented as an invited keynote speaker at international conferences and events in UK, Asia and Europe. Maurice has published over 460 internationally peer-reviewed publications including books, journal papers, conference and workshop papers and book chapters.

He is principal investigator or investigator on more than 130 regional, national and international research projects, bringing funding of over £12M to Ulster University and raising total project funds of over £55M. He also serves as an invited expert reviewer for national and international awards as well as many national and international research funding organisations.

Maurice served for three years on UK Ofcom’s Advisory Committee on Older and Disabled People and currently serves as associate editor for Springer Nature npj Mental Health Research, Informatics for Health and Social Care, Journal of Enabling Technologies, and JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies. He served as Chair of Cedar Foundation 2016-2022 and was awarded Trustee of the Year, at Chief Officers 3rd Sector (CO3) Leadership Awards. In 2019, he was elected as a Board Member of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics and is incoming President-elect for 2024.

Maurice is also a past winner of the European €200,000 IST Grand Prize, has won with colleagues the Best Innovation in Practice Award at the Dementia Care Awards, the Societal Impact Award at the UK National KTP Best of the Best Awards 2020 and recently won Highly Commended for the Mobile App of the Year at the 2021 Digital DNA Awards for the InspireD reminiscence for dementia app. He also won the Inaugural Award for Industry-Academic Collaboration from the Centre for Behaviour Change Conference on Behaviour Change for Health: Digital and Other Innovative Methods, in 2019 with colleagues.

Gareth Hetherington

Director of Economic Policy Centre

Professor Siobhan O'Neill

Professor of Mental Health Sciences

Siobhan O’Neill is a Professor of Mental Health Sciences at Ulster University. Her current research programmes focus on trauma and suicidal behaviour in Northern Ireland (NI) and novel interventions for mental health and suicidal behaviour. Siobhan has expertise in qualitative and quantitative (epidemiology and survey) research methods.

Prior to joining Ulster University in 2000, she completed a degree in psychology at the Queen's University of Belfast and a masters in health psychology at NUI Galway. She also worked as a Public Health Researcher, conducting evaluations of health services and users’ experience of care.

Between 2005 and 2008 Siobhan coordinated the largest ever study of mental health in Northern Ireland, the NI Research and Development Office funded, NI Study of Health and Stress. This study revealed the high proportions of the NI population who had unmet mental health needs and the extent of mental health disorders associated with the NI conflict.

She is also a coordinator of the NI suicide study, a study of the characteristics of completed suicides and undetermined deaths. She is responsible for the dissemination of the research findings on trauma and suicide to policy makers and stakeholders in NI.

Siobhan is a member of the World Mental Health Survey Consortium, a Director of the Irish Association of Suicidology and Youthlife, and an advisor to several organisations who provide services and interventions for mental health and suicide prevention and sits on several national and international research committees.

She has over 70 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including several ground breaking studies of mental health and suicidal behaviour in Northern Ireland. She is part of the World Mental Health Gender and Mental-Physical Comorbidity workgroups and led the world mental health paper linking mental illness with the subsequent development of cancer.

For further information see her research gate profile.

orcid.org/0000-0002-8786-2118

Professor Mark Tully

Research Director

Mark Tully is the Research Director in the School of Medicine and a Professor of Public Health at Ulster University.

Prof Tully’s research focuses on addressing population levels of physical inactivity and sedentary behaviour, which are major causes of poor physical and mental wellbeing. His research includes complex public health interventions targeting older adults and socio-economically disadvantaged communities. In addition, he is interested in the effects of changes in the built environment on behaviours. He is also Director of the Northern Ireland Public Health Research Network.

Professor David Gibson

Professor of Medicine

After his Biochemistry degree, Dr David Gibson worked at Randox Laboratories Ltd, where he was responsible for designing and commercialising novel biochip array diagnostic tests.

He was awarded a PhD in 2001 from the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), for research which exposed the role of cysteine proteinases in brain tumour invasion.

During a Wellcome Trust Fellowship Dr Gibson investigated the role of inflammation in a hypoxia driven model of diabetic retinopathy at the Centre of Vision and Vascular Science, QUB.

Since 2003 Dr Gibson focused his research efforts on the discovery and validation of protein biomarkers which could improve the management of arthritis patients.

During his time at the Rooney laboratory in the Centre of Infection and Immunity, QUB he spearheaded the use of proteomic and bioinformatics strategies to discover clinically useful biomarker candidates. He also identified post translational modifications in the Vitamin D binding protein that may act as a modulator of inflammation in juvenile arthritis patients.

In 2009, Dr Gibson was awarded a prestigious travel fellowship from Arthritis Research UK to conduct mass spectrometry based research at the Duncan laboratory at the University of Colorado, Denver over two years.

Research Interests

In 2013 Dr Gibson took up his post as Lecturer in Stratified Medicine and his research is focused on adult rheumatoid arthritis (RA). He is particularly interested in the development of new prognostic and predictive tools to improve the clinical management of arthritis patients.

He employs novel mass spectrometry based methods to robustly identify and quantify disease associated proteins in blood. He is also interested in the application of protein array technologies for autoantibody screening and flow cytometry in measuring B- and T-cell activation.

He has established research programmes in three key areas:
1. Mechanisms and biomarkers of resistance to biologic therapies.
2. Mechanisms and biomarkers of response to disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs.
3. Alternate blood sampling methods to support home based monitoring of arthritis.

Ultimately, Dr Gibson will develop novel monitoring tools to help clinicians target those patients who do not respond well to current therapeutics or develop drug resistance over time. This would allow earlier more effective treatments in RA patients, thus preventing joint damage and reducing disability.

Teaching Interests

1. Introduction to Pharmacogenomics and Stratified Medicine
2. Inflammatory and Immunological Disease
3. Genomics, Proteomics and Metabolomics
4. Disease and Treatment 2

Administrative Roles

BSc Associate Course Director

Dr Pamela Magee

Senior Lecturer in Human Nutrition

Dr Pamela Magee obtained a BSc Hons and PhD from Ulster University in 1996 and 2000.

She then completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at University College Dublin (2000-2001) following which she took up a Research Associate position within the Nutrition Innovation Centre for food & Health (NICHE) at Ulster University (2001-2005) investigating the effects of phytoestrogens (including soya isoflavones) in breast and prostate cancer.

Dr Magee took up her position as Lecturer in Human Nutrition in 2006 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2015 having served as Course Director of the BSc Hons Human Nutrition (2007-2011) and BSc Hons Food & Nutrition (2013-2014) programmes. She is currently Academic Division Head for Food, Nutrition and Dietetics.

Her teaching focus is on Sports Nutrition at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Dr Magee has published more than 30 full scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals in the area of soya isoflavones and health, vitamin D, sports nutrition and phytochemicals and cancer.

Dr Priyank Shukla

Senior Lecturer in Stratified Medicine (Bioinformatics)

Dr Priyank Shukla earned a First Class BSc in Biotechnology (2001-2004) from Bareilly College, MJPR University, Bareilly, India, followed by a First Class MSc in Bioinformatics (2004-2006) from University Institute of Engineering & Technology, CSJM University, Kanpur, India. Thereupon, he joined Laboratory of Genomics at Department of Histology, Embryology and Applied Biology, University of Bologna, Italy for 3-months as a Visiting Researcher to co-work on a Bioinformatics project aimed at full parsing of Genbank database, where he was awarded ‘DIEBA Prize for a Young Researcher working in Bioinformatics applied to Functional Genomics’.

Subsequently, he was awarded ‘Brains-in PhD Residential Scholarship’ (2007-2009) by the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna, Italy, and ‘100-Young Indian Researcher Scholarship’ (2009-2010) by Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), Government of Italy, to pursue a PhD in Computer Science (area of research: Machine Learning and Bioinformatics) at Bologna Biocomputing Group under the supervision of Professor Rita Casadio, where he developed Machine Learning based computational methods for prediction of disulphide bonding states of cysteine residues in proteins.

He then undertook a Postdoctoral Scientist (Bioinformatics) position at Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria (2010-2016), where he was responsible for consulting, data analysis and data management of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) based projects of Jak-Stat Signalling Consortium. His research then focused on applying NGS approaches to understand Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and Jak-Stat Signalling – linking infection, inflammation and cancer. During his Postdoc stint he received travel grants from EMBO Germany, Virginia Tech USA and OIST Japan for presenting his research work.

He was appointed to the post of Lecturer in Stratified Medicine (Bioinformatics) at Ulster University in July 2016 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in April 2024. He has served as the Associate Course Director of MSc Personalised Medicine program at Ulster University from August 2021 to December 2022, and since June 2022 he is serving as the Course Director of BSc Personalised Medicine program. His current research interests are in the fields of Personalised Medicine, Bioinformatics and Positive Pedagogy in Higher Education. As a PI/Co-PI, he has been successful in securing research funding from The Academy of Medical Sciences UK, UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), Innovate UK, National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) UK, Department for the Economy (DfE) Government of Northern Ireland, Invest NI, Health and Social Care Research & Development (HSC R&D), Novo Nordisk, The Wolfson Foundation, The Garfield Weston Trust, Wellcome Trust, British Council, British Science Association (BSA), British Association for International & Comparative Education (BAICE) and Advance HE.

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK, Fellow of Centre for Higher Education Research and Practice UK, Honorary Fellow of the Istituto di Studi Avanzati (Institute of Advance Studies), Italy, and was awarded thrice Ulster University’s ‘Distinguished Education Excellence Award’; first time under ‘Professional Practice Innovation’ category in 2018, second time under ‘Early Career Educator’ category in 2019, and third time under ‘Collaborative Education Excellence Fellowship’ category in 2023.

Research Interests

Scientific Research

Dr Shukla aims in developing Machine Learning (ML) / Artificial Intelligence (AI) based computational methods for in silico biomarker discovery and patients’ stratification in inflammatory diseases, cancer and multimorbidity via exploiting high-throughput omics, clinical and healthcare data.

Pedagogic Research

Dr Shukla aims in developing Positive Pedagogy based learning & teaching (L&T) methods for cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary subjects taught in a multi-disciplinary course environment in higher education (HE) sector.

Teaching Interests

Undergraduate Teaching

• BIO132: Biocomputing & Programming (Module Coordinator)
• BIO352: Biomedical Informatics (Module Coordinator)
• BIO548: Applied Bioinformatics

Postgraduate Teaching

• BIO704: Coding Skills for Biologist (Module Coordinator)

Administrative Roles

• Course Director (June 2022 – present) – BSc Hons Personalised Medicine
• Associate Course Director (Aug 2021 – Dec 2022) – MSc Personalised Medicine