Tríona Ní Chonghaile

Prof. Tríona Ní Chonghaile is an Associate Professor in the department of Physiology and Medical Physics Department at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She completed her PhD in Biochemistry in 2008, with Prof. Afshin Samali, at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She had an interest in translational science and moved to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School to do a postdoc with Prof. Anthony Letai, which was funded in part by a Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation Fellowship. In 2014, she moved back to Ireland and joined Prof. William Gallagher’s group as a Research Fellow working on identifying novel therapeutics for triple negative breast cancer. 

Dr. Ní Chonghaile’s lab (www.ttc-lab.com) is interested in understanding why certain cancers are sensitive to chemotherapy induced cell death while others are resistant and how best to treat resistant cancers. She has a particular interest in the BCL-2 family of proteins that regulate the mitochondrial cell death pathway. She uses an innovative technology called “BH3 profiling” to functionally interrogate the cell death signaling in both leukemia and breast cancers to identify novel effective combinations of treatments. Based on her work, she received the European Association of Cancer Research (senior) young scientist of the year award (2014), along with receiving the prestigious L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science UK&I Fellowship (2015). Her research is funded by grants from Wellcome Trust, Science Foundation Ireland, H2020 and Breast Cancer Now. She has published in high-impact journals Science, Cancer Discovery and Science Advances.