Dr. Aoife Harbison

Aoife is currently a post-doctoral research fellow with the Glycoscience group, working on the Health Research Board funded project: “The role of protein glycosylation in the pathogenesis of endometriosis and association with microbiome”. Her research focus is glycobiology, specifically the variation of glycan profiles across multiple patient and control sample types to identify and correlate glycan biomarkers for more effective diagnosis of endometriosis.

Aoife has a bachelor degree in Chemistry and Applied Mathematics from Maynooth University, and she continued her studies in Maynooth with a PhD in Computational Biophysics with Dr. Elisa Fadda (now of the University of Southampton).  Aoife’s research focus was on the significance of structure and conformational propensity of N-glycans, in the context of glycosylated protein biomolecular systems, using molecular dynamics simulation. Following this, she was a postdoctoral researcher in UCD’s School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering, with Dr. Ioscani Jimenez Del Val. She worked on an Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation project, with the focus on modulating N-glycan glycoforms in CHO cells for IgG products, using cell engineering strategies.