Martin O’Halloran
Co-Director, CÚRAM
Device Design
Martin O’Halloran (University of Galway) is the first academic in the history of University of Galway to hold a joint academic position between the Colleges of Engineering and Medicine.
He is the founder and director of the Translational Medical Device Lab in Galway, the first medical device lab in Ireland to be embedded in a regional hospital and co-located with a clinical trials facility. He leads a team of engineers/physicists/clinicians there, all working on novel medical device projects. Through this lab, he has secured substantial research funding, including a European Research Council (ERC) grant for medical device development. He is also a non-executive director of BioInnovate, a sister programme of Stanford’s BioDesign Programme, and co-leads the Health Innovation Hub Ireland activities at University of Galway.
He holds numerous national and international research and commercialisation awards, including Engineers Ireland Chartered Engineer of the Year (2014), Science Foundation Ireland’s Early Career Researcher of the Year (2016), and the award for Best Academic Contribution to Medtech (2016) from the Irish Medtech Association for his work with BioInnovate. He is co-inventor on a number of medical device patents, and is involved as a technical and commercial mentor to a number of successful medtech start-ups in Ireland.
O’Halloran’s research ranges from curiosity driven discovery research to the clinical evaluation and commercialisation of novel medical devices. From a basic science perspective, he examines new and improved methods for the measurement of the dielectric properties of biological tissue, with a particular emphasis on reducing measurement confounders. The dielectric repository at University of Galway is an important and unique platform for the development of novel electromagnetic imaging and therapeutic devices. This research is supported by the European Research Council.
O’Halloran is an active researcher with a strong record of publications in peer-reviewed journals and international conference proceedings. In recent years, he has been an invited chair and keynote speaker at several major electromagnetics, translational medicine and entrepreneurial conferences/seminars.
Related Links
Engineering – University of GalwayBioInnovate Core Team – University of Galway
