Professor Gerard O'Keeffe

Gerard O’Keeffe is a Professor in the Department of Anatomy & Neuroscience and a Fellow at the Centre for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland. He graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD in Neuroscience from UCC after the award of a PhD fellowship from the Irish Research Council. He was a visiting researcher at the Karolinska institute in Sweden, which was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Biosciences in Cardiff University in the UK. He is a founding member of the Parkinson’s Disease Research Cluster (PDRC) and the Brain Development and Brain Repair group (www.bdrg.org) at UCC. He has received a number of fellowships and awards including UCC PhD Supervisor of Year in 2019.  He serves as an elected member of governing body of the Anatomy Society which is one of the world’s oldest anatomical societies. He is also a member of NECTAR (Network of European CNS Transplantation and Restoration). He sits on the editorial board of a number of journals including Neural Regeneration Research. His work has been featured in journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Brain, JAMA Psychiatry and Journal of Neuroscience. Prof. O’Keeffe’s current research interests are focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate midbrain dopaminergic neuron development and degeneration and how these can be applied to developing new therapies for Parkinson’s disease.