DrAmy Heather Fitzpatrick

Amy Fitzpatrick is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Veterinary Medicine, UCD, where she holds an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. She first trained in foodborne virology, completing an MSc at the Technical University of Denmark in 2016 with Dr Anne Charlotte Schultz and Prof Maarten Nauta, using quantitative microbial risk assessment to fine tune dose response models for norovirus. Her PhD at Munster Technological University (2019-2023), supervised by Prof Paul Cotter, Dr Sinéad Keaveny and Dr Helen O'Shea, developed high throughput sequencing methods for the detection and characterisation of norovirus in complex matrices.

Dr Fitzpatrick's current research mines public resources such as the Sequence Read Archive for novel viruses and to expand host and geographic ranges of known viruses. She is also developing a method for detecting viruses in complex sample types using adaptive sampling with Oxford Nanopore Technology. Her skills span sequencing, diagnostic method development, bioinformatics and machine learning, and she works across wet lab, computational and One Health frameworks.

She is committed to building genomics capacity and to fair data practices and reproducible tools. She has received funding from the Microbiology Society to support Virus Hunters, a citizen science initiative, and has served on ELIXIR working groups. She teaches introductory genomics to undergraduates, postgraduates and staff, and is a Carpentries instructor.