ProfessorDenis Shields

My main teaching interests are in developing skills of data analysis, data interpretation and critical thinking in students faced with complex biological datasets.

I lead a research group of three PhD students, three postdocs and one research assistant, and am involved in a number of other research collaborations.

Aside from working in universities (UCD, TCD, RCSI, Southampton) I have also worked in industry, in the computational analysis of clinical datasets ( ICON Clinical Research, and Surgen Ltd), and maintain contacts with industry, including my role as a member of the Enterprise Ireland funded Food for Health centre, which works with dairy industry partners.

I am strongly interested in interdisciplinary research uniting computational and experimental approaches, and to promote this, I am Director of the UCD Bioinformatics Centre; and Director, of the UCD Bioinformatics and Systems Biology PhD Programme. The main funding for such research is through the SFI PhD programmes in genomics data science (see genomicsdatascience.ie, where I am lead UCD -coapplicant) and in fundamentals of data science (www.data-science.ie) both of which advertise recruitment for 2022 towards the end of 2021.

I am Head of Node for Elixir Ireland (see elixir-europe.org)

My publications have been extensively published and cited with >15,000 citations and a H-index of >60 (according to Google Scholar, see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KxEwP9UAAAAJ). I have co-authored >170 articles in peer-reviewed journals, being first or last (senior) author of over >70 of these. They have been published in journals ranging from those with a wide readership (like Nature), to others which are much more specialist (like the Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling). Of my two published co-authored patents, one has been licensed to industry.

Alumni of my research group have gone on to academic positions (Professor of Bioinformatics, NUIG; Senior Lecturer, University of New South Wales, Lecturer computer science UCD; Wellcome Trust Henry Wellcome Fellowship UCD) and to industry positions (Research Scientists and group leaders in Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Havoc, Regeneron, Human Longevity, Monsanto), and to found a peptide bioinformatics company (Nuritas).