Ciara Murphy Assistant Professor

Ciara Murphy is a graduate of Biological Sciences from National University Maynooth (2006). Her PhD was in the area of bone tissue engineering, elucidating the response of bone progenitor cells to the structural properties of collagen-based scaffolds, under the supervision of Prof Fergal O’Brien in the Tissue Engineering Research Group (TERG) in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) (2010). In 2011, she began a post-doctoral fellowship in Prof David Little’s orthopaedic research group in University of Sydney, Australia whereby she applied her experience in tissue engineering to develop novel therapeutic approaches to augment bone healing in challenging orthopaedic defects. In 2015, she returned to Ireland as Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine, University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, before returning as a StAR Lecturer to the Department of Anatomy and Regenerative Medicine in RCSI in 2017. She is the recipient of the prestigious New Investigator Recognition Award (NIRA) from the Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS) (2014) and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2016).

Currently she leads a research group within TERG in RCSI and is funded by SFI, Horizon 2020 and IRC, and she is also a PI in the Trinity Centre for Biomedical Engineering (TCBE). Dr Murphy’s Research Group designs and develops advanced biomaterials as innovative platforms for disease model systems and targeted therapeutic delivery systems for tissue repair. Her work in AMBER is on the study of cell-matrix interactions in metabolic bone disease, such as osteoporosis, to design targeted injectable biomaterial therapies and technologies that impede pathological cell activity and promote repair.