Aoife McLysaght


Aoife McLysaght is a Professor in the Molecular Evolution Laboratory of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, University of Dublin in Ireland.

Education

McLysaght was educated at the University of Dublin where she was a student of Trinity College and awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Genetics in 1998, followed by a PhD in 2002 for research supervised by Kenneth H. Wolfe on the evolution of vertebrate genome organisation.

Career and research

Following her PhD, she completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Irvine working with Brandon Gaut before returning to work in Dublin in 2003. Her research in molecular evolution and comparative genomics has been published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, Bioinformatics, Genome Research, PNAS and the journal Yeast.
She has served as senior editor and associate editor for the journals Molecular Biology and Evolution and Genome Biology and Evolution, and is on the editorial board of the journal Cell Reports. She is a member of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution and The Genetics Society. She served as Treasurer of SMBE 2012–14 and was elected President of the Society in 2017.

Outreach and media

McLysaght is a regular contributor to public events, and has spoken at IGNITE Electric Picnic, TEDx, The Royal Institution, and on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage. She brought genetics to a wider audience in the Royal Institution 2013 advent calendar where she featured in videos on human chromosome 1, human chromosome 14, mitochondrial DNA and the Science Gallery, Dublin. In 2018 she was a guest lecturer with Alice Roberts at the televised Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

Awards and honours

McLysaght was awarded European Research Council Consolidator Grant 2018–23 and an ERC Starting Researcher grant from 2013 to 2018, and the President of Ireland Young Researcher's Award by Science Foundation Ireland in 2005. She gave the J. B. S. Haldane lecture of The Genetics Society in 2016.

Personal life

McLysaght is a grand-daughter of genealogist Edward MacLysaght. McLysaght has two children, one cat, and one dog called Cara whose genome has been sequenced.