Find out more about our team of clinicians, lecturers and researchers and their areas of expertise.
Dr Patrick Mallon graduated in Medicine from Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland and undertook subsequent clinical training in infectious disease medicine in Sydney, Australia where he completed a PhD in the clinical and molecular aspects of HIV-associated Lipodystrophy (the commonest long-term side effect of antiretroviral therapy). Dr Mallon returned to Ireland in 2007 to take up a consultant appointment as an Infectious Diseases Specialist at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, a major Irish teaching hospital that cares for a large cohort of HIV-infected patients. Dr Mallon’s research interests include translational research into toxicities of antiretroviral therapy and cardiovascular disease, and pharmacology of anti-infectives. He has published widely in these areas and also acts as a reviewer for several international peer-reviewed medical journals.
Dr. Aoife Cotter is currently working as a Consultant in Infectious Diseases at the Mater Misericordiae and St Vincent’s University Hospitals. She completed a PhD focusing on cohort methodology and bone disease in HIV under the supervision of Dr. Paddy Mallon (HMRG/University College Dublin) and Prof Caroline Sabin (Medical Statisticsand Epidemiology, University College London). In addition to HIV UPBEAT, a longitudinal cohort exploring bone health, new research interests include exploring radiological and clinical changes in those undergoing contemporary hepatitis C treatment (The TRACER Cohort) and bone, kidney and gut microbiome alterations around antiretroviral therapy initiation (The BIGGER Study). Future, projects hope to exploit contemporary mobile health technologies to assess frailty and ultimately to promote healthy ageing in people living with HIV.
Dr. Eoin Feeney completed his Higher Specialist Training in Infectious Diseases in 2012, and was awarded his PhD examining the metabolic complications of HIV infection by UCD (undertaken in the HIV Molecular Research Group) in the same year. He undertook a Clinical Research Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, studying the effects of HIV and hepatitis C co-infection on accelerated hepatic fibrosis before returning to Ireland in 2014 to establish the Department of Infectious Diseases at St. Vincent’s University Hospital. His areas of interest are chronic viral infections and their complications.
Tara is currently undertaking a PhD through the School of Medicine coordinating a multi-centre, prospective, randomised trial of short course alendronate therapy or placebo combined with vitamin D and calcium to prevent loss of bone mineral density in antiretroviral-naïve, HIV-1 infected subjects initiating antiretroviral therapy. Her long term career objective is becoming a clinician academic with a focus on developing independent research within the HMRG. Tara’s aim is to be competitively able to attract national and international research funding and collaborations within a successful dynamic research group.
Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr Willard Tinago has interest and experience in observational cohort studies, epidemiology and randomized trials in HIV and other infectious diseases. He is currently the lead for the University College Dublin Infection Diseases Cohort and statistician for clinical studies conducted at the HIV Molecular Research Group (HMRG) in the UCD School of Medicine.
Elena has a BSc in Pharmacy and obtained her PhD from the Complutense University in Madrid 2014 focused on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacogenetics of HIV treatment. She joined the HMRG in March 2014 and has been working as a project coordinator since. Elena is responsible for the development, implementation and oversight of clinical trials and research studies. Elena is currently ppursuing a career looking at the pathogenesis of long-term comorbidities associated with HIV-infection, with a special interest in renal and bone disease.
Alejandro Garcia obtained his Bachelor’s Degree specialising in Molecular Biology in Venezuela. He subsequently engaged in a national diagnosis project of the Chagas disease focusing on the optimization of the diagnosis techniques mainly through PCR and microscopy, also studying the molecular aspects of the parasite genome. He is currently involved in pathogenesis-based research into co-morbidities associated with long-term HIV infection, focusing on the laboratory clinical analysis.
Aoife has been working with the HMRG since completing her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Health & Life Sciences in 2012 - initially working on molecular laboratory research, before spending a year as a clinical research assistant on the M-BRiHT study. In 2014 she returned to UCD to study medicine, but has continued to work with the group as a research assistant on a part time basis, mostly assisting on studies within the MMUH-UCD ID Cohort. She is due to graduate in 2019 and hopes to specialise in Infectious Diseases, while also furthering her clinical and scientific research career in the field.
Dr. Christine Kelly is an Infectious Diseases Physician and Clinical Academic with a specialist interest in HIV as a chronic inflammatory disease in low income sub-Saharan Africa. She graduated from the University of Manchester in 2006 and undertook her clinical training in Liverpool. During this time she successfully competed for an NIHR funded Academic Clinical Fellowship, with which she investigated neurocognitive impairment amongst people living with HIV in Malawi.
In 2012 she was awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship in Global Health and completed a PhD in HIV, Immune activation and Endothelial Dysfunction at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Clinical Research Programme, Blantyre, Malawi. She moved to Ireland in 2016 to undertake specialist training and is working as an Honorary Clinical Research Fellow within CEPHR, where she aims to lead a programme into translational HIV research in a Global Health context