Assoc ProfessorEoin O'Cearbhaill

Eoin O'Cearbhaill is Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the UCD School of Mechanical & Materials Engineering, Director of the UCD Centre for Biomedical Engineering, and Co-Director of UCD's BE and ME Biomedical Engineering programmes. He leads the UCD Medical Device Design Group, which develops minimally invasive technologies for diagnosing and treating disease, from concept through to clinical use.

His research spans medical device design, therapeutic delivery and microneedles, additive manufacturing, soft robotics, and the biomechanics of the gastrointestinal tract and vasculature. The group's work has contributed to three UCD spin-out companies (LaNua Medical, Latch Medical and Lia EyeCare), more than a dozen patent filings, and over €8 million in competitive research funding. He is a Conway Fellow, a funded investigator with the Research Ireland centres CÚRAM and I-Form, and a NovaUCD Entrepreneur in Residence.

Before joining UCD in 2013, Eoin was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women's Hospital in the lab of Prof. Jeffrey Karp, working on new medical devices and next-generation therapeutic delivery. Earlier, he held industry roles at Veryan Medical and Creganna-Tactx, where he helped establish the Specialty Needles Division in Marlborough, MA. He holds a BE (Biomedical) and PhD from the University of Galway, where his doctoral work studied the mechanical stimulation of mesenchymal stem cells for vascular tissue engineering.

His awards include the 2026 NovaUCD Innovation Award, the 2023 NovaUCD Innovation Champion of the Year Award, first prize at MIT Sloan BioInnovations 2012, and a share of the IChemE Innovative Product of the Year Award 2013. At UCD he introduced a Medical Device Design module based on the Stanford Biodesign process.