Professor Patricia Kearney is Professor of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health in UCC. Her research interests are in large scale observational epidemiology and intervention studies in chronic disease prevention. Patricia obtained a medical degree from University College Cork in 1998, graduating first in her class. She completed training in internal medicine in Ireland and the US. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to undertake a MPH in Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and she subsequently completed a PhD in Public Health. In 2003 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Cardiovascular Research Initiative Junior Research Fellowship to work as a Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She worked at the Clinical Trial Services Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit and her work focused on tabular and individual patient data meta-analyses. In 2007 she was awarded a Beeson Fellowship (NIH funded career development award) to work on TILDA, the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing and during her fellowship she worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Centre of Aging and Population Health at the University of Pittsburgh as well as a Clinical Research Fellow in Trinity College Dublin. She established the ESPRIT (Evidence to Support Prevention Implementation and Translation) research group at UCC leading a transdisciplinary group of researchers in epidemiology, biostatistics, clinical trials, implementation science and health psychology. Patricia was the lead PI in Ireland for the EU FP7 multi-centre clinical trial, ‘Multi-modal Effects of Thyroid Hormone Replacement for Untreated Older Adults with Subclinical Hypothyroidism; a Randomised Placebo-controlled Trial (TRUST), the largest trial ever conducted among people with subclinical hypothyroidism. As a HRB Research Leader she leads a programme of research on a population approach to the prevention and control of diabetes. She also leads a HRB Interdisciplinary Capacity Enhancement award training future leaders in population health and health services research and developing an evidence based patient and provider level obesity intervention in primary care.
