Sinéad is a Research Fellow with the Aberdeen–Belfast Evidence Collaboration, one of the 13 NIHR funded Evidence Synthesis Groups in the UK, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Authority. Based in the Centre for Public Health at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), she contributes to a range of quantitative evidence syntheses, including reviews on supplemental imaging for breast cancer screening, risk stratification models for screening, and biomarkers for sepsis. She has extensive experience in intervention reviews, prognostic factor reviews, and diagnostic test accuracy reviews.
Sinéad’s academic and clinical background is in clinical nutrition. She worked in Tallaght University Hospital for eight years before undertaking an HRB-funded PhD at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) on pancreatic disease, which she completed in 2014. As a Post Doctoral Researcher and later Senior Research Fellow at TCD, she led multiple studies on nutrition, pancreatic disease, diabetes, bone health, digital health, and insulin resistance, and contributed to the development of many UK and European clinical guidelines for pancreatitis.
She also has a strong interest in research communication and previously served as Scientific Communications Officer in the School of Medicine at TCD (2022–2023). She is a founding member and lead of a Communications Network across the UK’s Evidence Synthesis Groups. Alongside her core research activities, she has an interest in improving the methodological processes of evidence syntheses, particularly in the dissemination and communication of review findings. She leads several Studies Within a Review (SWARs) at QUB and was awarded Evidence Synthesis Ireland SWAR funding in 2024.
Sinéad is also the Northern Ireland Lead for the newly established Ireland GRADE Network and contributes to a GRADE focus group on Implications for Research.
