Potential Treatment for Epilepsy Seizures and Tech Trends to watch in 2022

Dr Deirdre Kilbane was recently interviewed by Irish Tech News about her research at the Walton Institute including the EU FET Open PRIME project. Listen to the full episode below now.

Dr Deirdre Kilbane is Head of Division of the Emerging Network Laboratory (ENL) in Walton Institute at Waterford Institute of Technology, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Physics in University College Dublin. Deirdre received a BSc in Experimental Physics along with a PGD in Education from University College Dublin (UCD). She was awarded a PhD in Mathematical Physics from the National University of Ireland Maynooth for her thesis ‘Searches for signatures of quantum chaos’.

From 2014-2016 she was a Marie Curie Fellow of ultrafast surface science in the Aeschlimann Laboratory, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. She joined the TSSG in 2018 and is coordinator and principal investigator of the EU Horizon2020 FETOpen project PRIME. The aim of this multidisciplinary project is to develop a living brain implant that can sense and suppress epilepsy seizures before they happen.

The vision of ENL is to develop innovative technologies for 5G/6G wireless, and quantum communication networks. The team’s background is in information communication science, and they have a wide range of expertise in beyond 5g wireless communications, Internet of Things (IoT), network security and knowledge defined networks. The main research interests of Dr. Deirdre Kilbane centre around developing implantable medical devices to enable personalised medicine via the internet of bio-nano-things with a particular focus on neurodegenerative disorders and epilepsy.

She is also interested in quantum technologies for quantum communication, sensing and imaging. Her research combines nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, quantum physics and molecular communications to develop innovative technologies for Agriculture, Healthcare and ICT. Dr. Kilbane is a member of three SFI Research Centres, Future Neuro (for neurodegenerative disorders), CONNECT (for communication networks) and VistaMilk (for digitalizing dairy).