Biography

A University of London graduate, Dr Boylan received an MSc in Physiology before moving to King’s College Hospital London to undertake a PhD in Neonatal Neurophysiology – EEG and cerebral blood flow velocity in the sick newborn baby.  Dr Boylan returned to Cork in 2002.  Her research at King’s College concentrated on accurately diagnosing seizures or ‘fits’ in newborn babies by monitoring electrical brain activity. Seizures in this age group may represent serious underlying brain injury, caused by lack of oxygen around the time of birth. The accurate diagnosis of seizures in very sick newborn infants has proven to be very difficult. She has published the first studies of blood flow regulation in the brain during seizures in sick newborn babies undergoing intensive care. She has continued to develop this research in Cork and has recently been awarded a Science Foundation Ireland Principal Investigator Career development award.

Dr Boylan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Medicine, UCC and co-ordinates Special Study modules and Undergraduate Research projects.

Research Interests

Much of Dr Boylan’s recent work is of an interdisciplinary nature and aims to create a synergy between Medicine and Engineering by using the skills and techniques of engineering signal processing research to address important medical problems such as automated seizure detection. She has recently established the Newborn Brain Research Group in Cork to provide a base and discussion forum for clinicians, scientists and engineers engaged in neonatal research. The vision of this group is to promote the development of patient focussed solutions, based on interfacing physiological signal acquisition and digital signal processing. The research activity is required to be highly interdisciplinary and will provide the platform for interaction and collaboration between clinical, industrial and academic partners to achieve this vision for Biomedical signal processing at UCC.