Dr
Marion RowlandProfile page
Emeritus Assistant Professor/Lecturer (RTA)
School of Medicine
Orcid identifier0000-0003-2701-830X
- Emeritus Assistant Professor/Lecturer (RTA)School of Medicine
- 01 7164549
- University College Dublin, School of Medicine, Mater Hospital Eccles Street Dublin 7
BIO
Marion Rowland graduated from Medical School at the National University of Ireland Galway in 1979 (MB, BCh, BAO). Following graduation she spent 2 years in Internship/ Residency postgraduate training in Ireland, involving rotations in General/Internal Medicine, General Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology and Pediatrics. Subsequently she worked in Nigeria as a Medical Officer for over 2 years providing Medical, Pediatric and Obstetric care, in a 200-bed hospital in a densely populated area of Cross River State. Between 1985 and 1989 she provided long-term family practice/ general practitioner locum cover in isolated, mainly Native Indian communities across several provinces in Canada. On returning to Ireland Dr Rowland completed a Masters in Public Health at University College Dublin, following which she began her career in Epidemiology. She subsequently completed a PhD [Epidemiology] under the supervision of Prof. Leslie Daly at UCD. For the past 15 years she has been a Clinical Epidemiologist at the School of Medicine and Medical Science at UCD with a special interest in research on pediatric gastrointestinal diseases. Her work has been published on several occasions in the highest impact journals in both Gastroenterology and Pediatrics. She has twice been an invited editorial/commentary provider to the Lancet. She won the overall award for the best research publication from an Irish university at the annual Royal Academy of Medicine of Ireland/IJMS Awards. This award was based on her research on the epidemiology of Helicobacter pylori. In 2010-11 Dr Rowland worked in the Directorate of Quality and Clinical Care of Health Service Executive to develop a quality improvement/comparative effectiveness research protocols for the chronic disease programs. As part of this project she provided the clinical research support to optimize scheduling of outpatient appointments and investigations using constraint optimization in collaboration with Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C). An important outcome of this work was to demonstrate that there was significant underutilization of resources which could be much more effectively utilized if new models of scheduling were introduced for appointments and staff rosters. Dr. Rowland is currently a board member of the Health Research Board, which is the national agency responsible for developing clinical research capacity in Ireland and funding clinical research. She also maintains her interest in the developing world through her involvement with a number of nongovernmental organizations.