Professor Deirdre Murray

Deirdre Murray is a Consultant Paediatrician and Professor in the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, University College, Cork. Deirdre qualified from University College Cork in 1995, and completed subspecialist paediatric training in Paediatric Intensive Care Medicine in Bristol Royal Hospital for Sick Children, and as a Paediatric Intensive care Fellow in the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne from 2003-2004. She completed her PhD thesis on neuro-developmental outcome in hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy in 2008. In 2012 she was awarded a prestigious Health Research Board Clinician Scientist Award for BiHiVE an ongoing project focusing on the discovery and validation of biomarkers in neonatal brain injury.

Deirdre is the Principal Investigator of the Cork BASELINE birth cohort. BASELINE is one of the largest and most detailed mother-child cohorts in Europe and is also the first and currently only longitudinal birth cohort in Ireland. It contains data and biological samples from over 2000 Irish children from before birth to the age of 5. This study is a unique resource for collaborative research in the fields of allergy, obesity, neurocognitive outcome and genetic programming.

For the last 10 years, Prof Murray’s research has focused on early brain injury, and the development of new ways to predict and assess neurocognitive outcome in children. She leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers in the fields of paediatrics, neonatology, neuroscience, nursing and psychology.