Speaker

Dr Shane Hegarty is Chief Scientific Officer, Co-Founder and IP Co-Inventor at AXONIS Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotechnology company. He has 15+ years of experience leading cutting-edge, award-winning neuro-protection, -modulation and -regeneration research for neurological disorders. In recent years, Shane has completed a number of competitive biotech entrepreneurial programs, such as Creative Destruction Labs and Harvard I-Labs. As a Research Fellow in Professor Zhigang He’s lab in Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Hegarty led in vivo phenotypic screens, such as a genome-wide AAV-CRISPR screen for neuro-protection and -regeneration in a CNS injury model.

Before leaving a tenure-track position in Ireland to pursue cutting-edge research in the US, he was a Faculty Member in Neuroscience Department of University College Cork, and received the prestigious Neuroscience Ireland Investigator Award in 2016. During his academic career, Dr. Hegarty was awarded several highly-competitive scholarships and fellowships to support independent research, including from the Irish Research Council, National University of Ireland and William Randolph Hearst Foundation. A Royal Irish Academy grant supported post-doctoral training in the Erasmus MC, Netherlands and KU Leuven, Belgium. A highly productive researcher with 30+ research papers (22 as first/senior author), >1,400 citations, several patents, h-index = 18, and a serial grant awardee. Dr. Hegarty has acted as an Editor for Frontiers and The Biochemist, and expert reviewer for a number of esteemed journals and international funding agencies. An experienced entrepreneur, innovator, researcher, team builder and teacher, who graduated top of his Neuroscience BSc class.