Physiology Research Day

15 Sep 2025

We kicked off the academic year this week with our annual research day. A strength of our department is the diversity of our research interests.

Postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers presented updates on:

• calcium channels in cancer
• cancer cachexia
• gene editing in cystic fibrosis
• vagally-innervated network projections to the hippocampus
• gut-brain axis in Parkinson's disease
• gut-muscle axis in Duchenne muscular dystrophy
• stress axes in early life oxygen dysregulation and infection
• GI oxytocin in health and disease

These talks were complemented with two talks from newly appointed staff in the department, Colin McNamara and Rosanne Raftery.

Rosanne presented on the development of articular cartilage using human pluripotent stem cells. Her enthusiasm for transcriptomics shone through as bright as the heat maps! We learnt about the critical role of growth factors across temporal domains in determining cell fate. The work revealed the potential for stem cell therapies to treat osteoarthritis. We are super excited to see this work take off in Cork.

Colin presented on the interplay between dopaminergic reward systems and memory, gleaned from technically challenging studies to reveal fundamental aspects of nervous system function relating to behaviour. We learnt that dopamine modulation during learning influences sleep-dependent memory consolidation. His enthusiasm for raster plots was a welcome reminder of just how much scientists are invested in their work, a labour of love! Colin has established a research group and new studies on neural network mapping are successfully underway. Happy days!

We rounded off the day with a pizza party. Ciara Gavin working with John Mackrill on calcium signalling in oesophageal cancer won 'best talk' by a postgraduate researcher voted by our undergraduate students in the BSc Physiology programme. Ciara received a prize sponsored by The Physiological Society

Huge thanks to Prof Niall Hyland for organising the day and running the show.