Originally from Limerick with strong connections to Clare, Helen now lives in Dublin with husband, Jonathan and her teenage children, Elliot, Klara and Hugo and Daisy their nutty cockerpoo. When not in the lab, Helen loves being out and about, having fun with family and friends, walking the beach, cycling by the sea or hopping on a plane somewhere nice. 

She has just finished John Boyne’s ‘The Echo Chamber’ which she found so funny and would highly recommend.

My bucket list is quite extensive, all travel related. Essentially, I intend to take every travel related opportunity that arises up over the next few years!

Helen Roche is the director of the UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular & Biomedical Research. She is also a Full Professor of Nutrigenomics at the UCD Conway Institute and the UCD Institute of Food & Health in University College Dublin. 

Helen’s research deals with nutrition and genomics or ‘nutrigenomics’. This is a relatively new field of research that is growing rapidly since the entire human genome was mapped in the 1990s. Nutrigenomics looks at how nutrients in our diet interact with our genes. Helen looks at the genes, proteins, and metabolites in different people to better understand how food switches on or off different genes or proteins to impact our health. People often respond to food quite differently. Personalised nutrition tries to understand these differences, so that we may ultimately be able to tailor what we eat to suit our individual needs and genetic makeup to positively impact our health.