Dr. Emer Bourke was awarded her B.Sc. and Ph.D. by the Department of Pharmacology, University College Dublin. Her first postdoctoral position was funded as a Marie Curie Association European Individual Postdoctoral Fellow in the Istituto Mario Negri in Milan, Italy. Following this she returned to Ireland, this time as a Marie Curie European Reintegration Postdoctoral Fellow, working in the Centre for Chromosome Biology (CCB) at University of Galway. During her time at the CCB, she advanced becoming a HRB-funded Senior postdoctoral fellow. As a self-funded postdoctoral fellow, she published in prestigious journals such as Blood, EMBO journal, Oncogene and Cell Stem Cell. In 2010, she was appointed as a Lecturer in Biomolecular Science in the Institute of Technology Sligo, before returning to University of Galway to take up the position as a Lecturer and group leader within the Discipline of Pathology. Her research group focuses on investigating mechanisms of genomic instability in breast cancer and is funded by a Millennium Research Fund Award and Hardiman Scholarship.

The centrosome is a cellular organelle which duplicates once per cell cycle to direct the formation of the bipolar spindle during cell division. Excessive centrosome number ( >2 centrosomes per cell; termed centrosome amplification) is a characteristic of most human tumours. The phenomenon is triggered by DNA damage and in turn, perpetuates genomic instability by inducing errors during cell division. Recent studies have shown that the induction of extra centrosomes drives an oncogene-like transformation of breast cells into a malignant invasive phenotype capable of metastasis to other sites in the body. Current work in my lab characterizes this tumourigenic transformation in breast cell lines and patient tissue samples. We hypothesise that centrosome amplification is one of the key pathways linking genomic instability to structural and intracellular changes which promote tumour progression.