HeartBeat Trust – Team
Professor Ken McDonald is a Consultant Cardiologist in St. Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin, Ireland. He is also a lecturer in Medicine at University College Dublin specialising in heart failure and interventional cardiology. Professor McDonald qualified from UCD medical school in 1981 and trained in St. Vincent’s Hospital before moving to the University of Minnesota USA in 1988. Between 1991 and 1996 he held the position of Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Minnesota and was subsequently promoted to Associate Professor of Medicine in 1996. Prof. McDonald is chairman of the Irish Heart Foundation Council on heart failure. He has had longstanding research interest in heart failure focusing primarily on the areas of ventricular remodelling, prevention of heart failure and health care delivery of heart failure services.
Professor Mark Ledwidge (BSc Pharm, PhD, DBS, MPSI) is Co-Founder/Research and Developmental Director of Heartbeat Trust. He is an adjunct Professor in the School of Medicine at University College Dublin. Following graduation as a pharmacist and completion of a PhD in pharmaceutics at Trinity College, Dublin with Elan Corporation, Mark worked for Baxter Healthcare and Servier Laboratories in technical and marketing roles. He completed a Diploma in Business Strategy 2001 before co-founding the Heartbeat Trust, H&L Pharma and Solvotrin Therapeutics. Solvotrin successfully launched its first product Active Iron in 2017 and is currently developing anti-inflammatory drugs with applications in cancer chemoprevention.
Marks research interests include: medicines management and prevention of cardiovascular disease; natriuretic peptide and fibrosis in left ventricular dysfunction; iron deficiency; genetic and epigenetic approaches for the management of cardiovascular disease; pharmacogenomics. He is inventor on a number of pending and granted patents. Mark is Co-Principal Investigator of the PARABLE study and the St Vincent’s Screening TO Prevent Heart Failure (STOP-HF) programme, which won a Royal College of General Practitioners Award in 2015 and has been incorporated into the 2017 American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology Guidelines.
Memberships:
- Co-Chair National Pharmacy Reference Group
- Malawi Health Partnership
Becky Fox is senior Cardiac Physiologist/Echocardiographer. She received a BSC (Hons) Degree in Clinical measurement in 2009 and joined Heartbeat Trust in 2015.
Becky specialises in Echocardiography with interest in the prevention and treatment of Heart failure.
Rosemary Geoghegan has been a member of Heartbeat Trust since 2008. She is administrator for Heartbeat Trust and the STOP-HF Screening Service at St Michael’s Hospital, Dun Laoghaire.
Aoife McDermott – Clinical Research Nurse
Aoife is a qualified nurse with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from The University of Limerick. She also holds a Master’s Degree (MSc) in Research from TCD.
Aoife is passionate about research in the care of the elderly hence her interest in cardiovascular research in older persons. Before moving to HBT, she worked at for UCD as a clinical research nurse based at the Mater Hospital.
Barry Dyer – Research Assistant
Barry holds an MSc in Exercise Science from the University of KZN, South Africa. After relocating to Ireland, he worked on an industry study investigating health and fitness in the Irish population before joining The HeartBeat Trust in March 2021. His research interests centre around the role of eHealth and Physical Activity in the prevention of Heart Failure.
Dr Chris Watson, BSc (Hons), PhD is a university Lecturer and a biomedical research scientist. Chris was awarded his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast and was subsequently awarded a postdoctoral Newman Fellowship to lead up heart failure prevention research at University College Dublin in 2006. From this time Chris has continued his research in this field with a focus on the development and pre-clinical testing of new epigenetic drugs for the treatment of heart disease and the development of new biochemical and molecular blood tests to help diagnose and monitor patients at-risk or with established heart disease.
