Jennifer Mahony
Biography
Jennifer graduated with a BSc in Food Science and Technology from Cork Institute of Technology in 2003. She pursued a PhD on the subject of prophage-encoded bacteriophage resistance mechanisms in the dairy bacterium Lactococcus lactis. After graduating with PhD in 2008, she continued to research phage-host interactions in her postdoctoral research. Appointed as lecturer in food microbiology in 2020 and Assoc. Prof in Molecular Food Microbiology in 2021, she leads a research team dedicated to understanding the mechanisms by which phages infect their hosts and how bacteria respond and evolve in order to adapt and survive. Her research team, furthermore, evaluate the functional properties of lactic acid bacteria, particularly thermophilic organisms such as Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus spp. She has published over 80 papers with an h-index of 35 (Google Scholar).