biology

Mary J. O'Connell

Mary J. O'Connell is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mary J. O'Connell rather than just read about it. In short: Mary J. O'Connell is an evolutionary genomicist and Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham.

Key takeaways

Mary J. O'Connell belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mary J. O'Connell to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mary J. O'Connell from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mary J. O'Connell is an evolutionary genomicist and Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. She is the Principal Investigator of the Computational & Molecular Evolutionary Biology Group in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham.

Education O'Connell is from Banagher on the Shannon, County Offaly, Ireland. She received her BSc in Biotechnology with Chemistry, and then PhD in Computational Molecular Evolution in 2005, from the University of Maynooth. Her PhD explored heterogeneity in rates of change between human and mouse protein-coding genes, selective pressure variation and adaptation. Later she spent six months as a Science Foundation Ireland postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork, working on genomic imprinting, selection and conflict theory, before starting her own independent research group.

Lab Members O'Connell's current team members are Dr. Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Dr. Charley McCarthy, Peter Mulhair, Alysha Taylor, David Orr, Ioannis Tsagakis, Georgios Nikolopoulos, Isabel Bird. O’Connell’s past lab members include Dr. Ann McCartney, Dr. Bede Constantinides, Dr. Karen Siu Ting, Katie Nicoll Baines, Natacha Chenevoy, Dr. Andrew E. Webb, Dr. Kathryn McRae, Dr. Ishani Sinha, Dr. Raymond J. Moran, Dr. Edel Hyland, Dr. Mark Lynch, Dr. Claire C. Morgan. Dr. Thomas A. Walsh, Katie Lee, Kabita Shakya, and Dr. Noeleen Loughran.

Career O'Connell was appointed as lecturer and Principal Investigator at Dublin City University (DCU) in 2005 when she established her independent research group. She became tenured at 27 and went on to be promoted to senior lecturer and then Deputy Head of Department at the School of Biotechnology, Dublin City University. In 2012, she became a Fulbright scholar awardee and spent a sabbatical year as Fulbright Visiting Professor at Harvard University in the Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology and the Museum of Comparative Zoology. She worked with Professor Scott Edwards and his group during her sabbatical. In September 2015, she left DCU to take up her "250 Great Minds University Academic Fellowship" at the University of Leeds. In July 2018, she was appointed as an Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham, where she is currently based.

Research Her lab's research areas are primarily focused around four research topics - phylogenomics, mechanisms of protein evolution, evolutionary theory and adaptation. The research is applied to a broad spectrum of areas including understanding the origins of eukaryotic life, speciation events and rapid evolutionary adaptations in polar bears, uncovering the evolution of sweet taste receptors in hummingbirds, identifying the molecular adaptions to the evolution of longevity in bowhead whales, resolving the mammalian phylogeny, and teasing apart the role of microRNAs in the evolution of the placenta. Along with her PhD students, Andrew Webb and Thomas Walsh, and later her postdoc Bede Constantinides, she wrote and published the software VESPA, a tool for accessible large-scale evolutionary and selective pressure analyses.

Professional activities O'Connell is a council member for the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, and is an Associate Editor for both of the Society's Journals (GBE and MBE). She was a co-organiser of the 2012 annual Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in Dublin, Ireland, which was attended by 1,300 delegates. She has organised and taught on EMBO advanced courses in Phylogenetics and phylogenomics in Maynooth, Ireland (2004), Medellin, Colombia (2009), Erice, Sicily (2013) and Iquitos, Peru (2016) At the University of Leeds, along with Dr. Niamh Forde and Dr. Julie Aspden, O'Connell set up the Leedsomics research institute. The mission of "LeedsOmics" is to unify the large number of ‘omics’ researchers at the University of Leeds into a single community. It includes 38 research groups from a range of fields and runs an annual Research Symposium. In 2015, O'Connell gave a Tedx talk at Dublin City University on "How to survive in a changing world"

Awards and honours 2012 Fulbright Research Scholar Award 2017 Elected as Fellow of the Linnean Society

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mary J. O'Connell

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mary J. O'Connell claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mary J. O'Connell before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mary J. O'Connell ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mary J. O'Connell

In research: Mary J. O'Connell appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mary J. O'Connell in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mary J. O'Connell is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 21st-century Irish biologists, 21st-century Irish women scientists, 21st-century women biologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mary J. O'Connell outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Mary J. O'Connell in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mary J. O'Connell means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mary J. O'Connell out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mary J. O'Connell in simple terms?

Mary J. O'Connell is an evolutionary genomicist and Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham.

Why does Mary J. O'Connell matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mary J. O'Connell?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mary J. O'Connell.