Siobhán is originally from Tipperary, but now lives in Dublin with her husband Liam. She has three grown-up children: Aoibhín, Caoimhe, and Joseph. When she’s not at work, she can be found up the mountains walking, or hanging out with family and friends. Siobhán likes to travel, and South America is somewhere that she has wanted to visit her whole life. This is still on her bucket list. She also loves live music and is sad to not have a ticket for Electric Picnic this year. 

Siobhán is an Associate Professor at the UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science and a Fellow in UCD Conway Institute. She is the coordinator for BactiVax, a European training network for early career researchers to develop vaccines that protect people against difficult to treat bacterial infections. Siobhán has an interest in pathogens that cause opportunistic infections in cystic fibrosis patients. Her work looks at vaccine development.

Currently, the most advanced vaccine in Siobhán’s lab is for a tropical infection called Melioidosis, which is a big problem in tropical regions like Thailand and Northern Australia – it can kill up to 40% of those it infects in parts of Thailand. Siobhán’s team have developed a vaccine which has been shown to prevent these infections in mice. They have spent the past several years studying the vaccine further to make sure it is safe and is stimulating the best immune response, and hope to begin testing it in human trials by the beginning of 2023. Siobhán will retire happy if this vaccine, or any of the other vaccines she’s working on in her lab, gets into humans to prevent potentially fatal diseases.