Our current team members
Meet our team and alumni
Prof. Corrado Santocanale
Principal Investigator
Corrado Santocanale received his Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Milan, Italy under the co-supervision of Paolo Plevani and Giovanna Lucchini. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) in John Diffley’s laboratory, Corrado studied the mechanisms that control the initiation of DNA replication uncovering the “origin firing checkpoint”, a pathway that prevents the activation of late firing origins in response to the inhibition of replication elongation or DNA damage. In 1999 Corrado joined Pharmacia Upjohn (subsequently Pharmacia Corp. Pfizer and Nerviano Medical Sciences) to lead a preclinical drug discovery program aimed at discovering and developing CDC7 kinase inhibitors as anti-cancer therapeutics. In 2007 Corrado moved to Galway to start an academic lab in NUIG. The primary interest of the lab is studying the mechanisms of DNA replication in human cells and exploiting the results in this field for therapeutic purposes.
Dr. Micheal Rainey
Senior Postdoctoral Researcher
Michael obtained his B.Sc in biochemistry and M. Res. from the University of Manchester, UK. He then went on to complete a Ph.D. at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research and the University of Glasgow where he investigated the role of DNA integrity checkpoint pathways in cell cycle regulation and cancer. Michael’s interest in the DNA damage response pathways continued as a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Prof. Michael Kastan, St Jude’s Hospital, Memphis, USA characterizing novel small molecule inhibitors of ATM kinase. Michael joined the Santocanale lab in 2008 and has The main focus of Michael’s work currently is understanding how human breast cancer cells respond to CDC7 kinase inhibition and what the genetic determinants are that affect responses. Using CRISPR/Cas9 genome-wide screening approaches he aims to identify novel genetic interactions, that will advance our understanding of how CDC7 regulates DNA replication, and genetic vulnerabilities that can be exploited by therapeutic strategies.
Bernard Stefanus
Ph.D. Student
Stefanus Bernard is a PhD researcher funded by SFI Centre for Research Training in Genomics Data Science. He obtained his B.Sc. in Bioinformatics from the Indonesia International Institute for Life Sciences (i3L) at Jakarta, Indonesia. He originally developed interest in cancer genomics. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic and in his final year, he spent most of his time in the research of SARS-CoV-2. His thesis focused on the bioinformatics pipelines for the analysis of SARS-CoV-2. This led him to join GSI Lab to assist the COVID-19 genomic surveillance in Indonesia for nearly a year before moving to Ireland to pursue his PhD. As team member in this lab he is pursuing his original passion in cancer genomics. His project focuses on the functional genomics analysis of potential drug candidates for cancer therapy using the combination of genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9 knock-out screens and a next-generation sequencing approaches.
Liadhan Farrell
PhD Student
Liadhan obtained her B.Sc in Genetics and Genomics in the University of Galway. She became part of a computational research group focusing on the genetic basis for schizophrenia as part of a summer internship program. Her final year thesis focused on metabolic analyses for classification of novel marine fungi. She joined Prof. Santocanale’s lab in September 2024 as a PhD researcher with the goal of combining her computational and wet lab skills to understand how DNA replication is regulated in human cells.
Simone Nicoletto
Master Student Researcher
Simone obtained a BSc degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Milan (Italy) in 2023. My thesis focused on developing reagents to study the role of proteins involved in the cellular response to DNA damage. Simone is now in the final year of the MSc in Molecular Biology of the Cell from the University of Milan. In September 2024, I joined the lab as an Erasmus+ student to undertake my thesis project.
Tara Quinn
Undergraduate Visiting Student Researcher
Tara after the first two years of pursuing a major in Biological Sciences and a minor in Chemistry at the University of Notre Dame, is eager to advance her scientific career and contribute to the research field of DNA replication and cancer therapeutics in the Santocanale Lab.
Alumni:
PhD at Unviersity of Galway, IE
CRUK Scotland Institute
Together in the years:
