Portrait artist: Sir William Orpen (Oil on canvass)
BORN: 1865 | DIED: 1945
Denis Joseph Coffey was born in January 1865 in Tralee, Co. Kerry.
Denis was appointed as a lecturer in UCD’s premises on Cecilia Street in 1893 and became Professor of Physiology four years later. His final position before the Presidency was as Dean of the Catholic University Medical School in 1905.
He led UCD through some of the most challenging times in Irish history including the First World War, the Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish war of 1919-1921, the Civil War, the growing pains of the Irish Free State, the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s, and the outbreak of the Second World War.
Denis presided over the erection of the new buildings at Earlsfort Terrace, the addition of the College of Science at Merrion St and of the Albert Agricultural College at Glasnevin to UCD in 1926 and the transfer of the medical school from Cecilia Street to Earlsfort Terrace in 1931.