School of Medicine Launches Eurolife Lecture Series

Posted on: 28 October 2008

Professor Dermot Kelleher, Head of the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and Chair of the Eurolife Network will launch the ‘Eurolife Distinguished Faculty Series’ on Thursday, October 30th, with a first lecture by Professor David Porteous, Head of Medical Genetics at the University of Edinburgh entitled, Our Genetic Inheritance – for Better or for Worse, in Sickness and in Health.

This year Trinity College is chairing the Eurolife Network, an esteemed network of  European universities in life sciences dedicated to promoting excellence in teaching and research. The Eurolife Network comprises prestigious universities in seven EU member states and include: Leiden Medical University Centre, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, Universitat de Barcelona, Georg-August-Universitat Goettingen, the University of Edinburgh and Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, all of which are at the forefront of research in the health sciences. Eurolife promotes a European dimension to its academic activities fostering coherence of research and training through combining resources, leading to a greater effectiveness of training and activities.  It meets these objectives through research and teaching collaborations and student and staff mobility.

“We are delighted to welcome our distinguished Eurolife partner Professor David Porteous to inaugurate this series of seminal lectures which we hope will promote much greater awareness and interaction between members of the Eurolife consortium,” commented Professor Kelleher. “Professor  Porteous’s work has had an enormous impact on our understanding of the genetics of neuropsychiatric disease. This is an important model for complex disease in general and the interaction of genes and the environment in moulding our health is a focus of much research here in TCD. “

The seminar series promotes research contacts between experts, principal investigators and researchers within member Eurolife institutions, with several seminars a year at each university where the visiting expert interacts with students and faculty on 1-2 day visit. The subject of the seminars covers Eurolife key research areas; among them, neuroscience, imaging, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, inflammation, genetics of complex diseases  & international health.

The inaugural lecture of the ‘Eurolife Distinguished Faculty Series’ will attract a wide audience of researchers and students and promises to be very interesting and stimulating public lecture on this rapidly advancing field of research. Professor David Porteous is a Professor of Human Molecular Genetics & Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Head of Medical Genetics and the current director of the Molecular Medicine Centre, he is also Director of the Genetics Core at the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility Western General Hospital Campus and  has had a long standing interest in the Genetics of Psychiatric Illness and Cystic Fibrosis.

Details:  Thursday, October 30, 2008
Venue:   Durkan Lecture Theatre, Institute of Molecular Medicine, Trinity    Centre for Health Sciences, St James’s Hospital

For further details contact Sheila Walshe, at swalshe@tcd.ie/ tel 8963157.