Professor Louise Kenney (Irish Centre for Fetal and Neonatal Translational Research and Cork University Maternity Hospital)

1 April 2016
1.00pm

Lecture Theatre, Clinical Sciences Building, UHCW

Professor Sudhesh Kumar, Dean of Warwick Medical School, is delighted to welcome Professor Kenny to give a Dean's Distinguished Lecture.

This lecture is also part of the UHCW Grand Rounds Series.

 

 

Biomarkers for Pre-eclampsia - where are we now?

Professor Louise Kenny is the founding Director of INFANT, Professor of Obstetrics at University College Cork and a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at Cork University Maternity Hospital, where she specialises in the management of high risk pregnancy. The primary focus of Louise’s research is how the in utero environment affects the future health and wellbeing of the infant.

Louise graduated in Medicine with Honours from the University of Liverpool, UK, in 1993. After completing her clinical and doctoral training in the UK, Louise moved to Ireland in 2006 and shortly afterwards was appointed as a Health Research Board Ireland Clinician Scientist. This 4 year award (of €1.6 million) underpinned the Screening for Pregnancy Endpoints SCOPE Study – a prospective longitudinal case cohort of pregnancy outcome which is now one of the world’s largest global pregnancy biobanks. The SCOPE study was also the foundation of Ireland’s first birth cohort- BASELINE: Babies after SCOPE, Evaluating Longitudinal Indices of Nutrition.

In July 2009, Louise was awarded a prestigious Principal Investigator Programme grant from Science Foundation Ireland to develop predictive metabolomic markers of poor pregnancy outcome. She is currently coordinating a European Consortium called IMPROvED which is conducting a phase IIa clinical trial of a prototype screening test for pre-eclampsia based on metabolomic technology and developed by Louise and her team in INFANT. Louise is the co-lead of the newly funded HRB Perinatal Clinical Trial Network and the PI of the STRIDER and PARROT Trials.

In 2012, Louise led a successful bid to establish INFANT, Ireland’s first and only perinatal research centre, supported by a grant portfolio of over €30 million.

In recent years Louise has received numerous awards and accolades in acknowledgment of the contribution her research group has made to the field of perinatal research, including the prestigious Science Foundation Ireland Researcher of the Year (2015), The American Heart Association Award for top paper published in the clinical science category (2014), Enterprise Ireland Life Sciences Researcher of the Year (2013) and Champions of Europe Award for Research Leadership in FP7 (2012) and the first Woman of the Year in the newly established category of STEM 2015 awarded by Tatler magazine in 2015.