Introduction
I am an academic Nephrologist, Internist and Intensivist with a specialist interest in the intersection of kidney and brain health. I studied Medicine at University College Cork, Ireland. I has a Diploma in Stroke and Cerebrovascular Medicine with the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland RCPI, a Masters in Internal Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, an MSc in Stroke Medicine at the Danube University Krems, Austria and an MSc in Evidence-Based Healthcare (Medical Statistics) from the University of Oxford. I completed a DPhil in Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford. The subject of my thesis was the impact of chronic kidney disease on stroke risk, mechanisms and outcomes. Following my DPhil, I continued to explore the kidney-brain axis as an Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and was awarded an NIH StrokeNet Fellowship to gain Stroke/Neurocritical Care trial experience at the Massachusetts General Hospital and to study genetic epidemiology at the Cerebrovascular Genomics Lab in Boston.
Research
Since August 2023, I have been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Wolfson Centre for the Prevention of Stroke and Dementia at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford. I am funded by the Guarantors of Brain and by the Alzheimer’s Association. I am also working clinically in the Intensive Care Units (ICU) at the John Radcliffe Hospital. In my research, I am using a transcranial doppler (a type of ultrasound) to investigate the impact of dialysis therapy on brain blood flow in critically ill patients in the ICU. My other areas of active research include the impact of acute kidney injury on the risk of delirium and post-ICU cognitive disorders, the risk and mechanisms of stroke in patients with pre-eclampsia, sex differences in stroke epidemiology, and the global capacity for the management of kidney failure. I am also one of the authors of the recently published 11th edition of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine.