Currently the Director of Research Strategy and Funding, Dr O’Driscoll will take up the position on the 13 March 2017. Speaking about the appointment, Dr Declan Bedford, Chairman of the Board said, ‘I would like to thank Mairéad for stepping into this crucial role. She has been central to advancing the research strategy and funding brief at the HRB in recent years and I know she will sustain the current momentum in the delivering our strategy’. Dr O’Driscoll said, ‘I welcome the opportunity to take on this interim role. As an organisation we focus on delivering good research and evidence to inform both policy and practice. My key priority will be to actively engage with internal and external stakeholders to ensure we deliver on our 2017 objectives, so that we can continue to do this with impact’.
Bionote Mairéad O’Driscoll is currently the Director of Research Strategy and Funding at the Health Research Board (HRB) with overall responsibility for all the HRB’s extramural funding programmes. Before that, she was Head of Policy, Evaluation and External Relations at the HRB. She worked as a researcher in academia and industry before moving into policy research, first with the Royal Society in London and then with the Wellcome Trust.  She also spent time in South Africa where she worked on the development of a national research and technology foresight study. She is a member of several national and international groups including the Oversight Group for the National Health Innovation Hub in Ireland, Enterprise Ireland’s Industrial Research and Commercialisation Committee, and the European Research Infrastructure Working Group for Food and Health. She also chairs IC-PerMed, the International Consortium for Personalised Medicine. She is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of London.