David Henshall

Professor David Henshall's undergraduate degree was from the University of Bristol, graduating with First Class Honours in Pharmacology in 1994. Postgraduate training on stroke modelling and neuronal injury was in the Department of Pharmacology and the Fujisawa Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, leading to the award of a PhD in Neuropharmacology in 1997. Post-doctoral training in cell death signaling in epilepsy was under Prof Roger Simon at the Department of Neurology, University of Pittsburgh, USA.

Following NIH funding in 1999, Prof Henshall was appointed Assistant Scientist at the newly established Robert S. Dow Neurobiology Laboratories, a private non-profit research institute in Portland, Oregon, USA. An RO1 award for research on apoptosis signaling in epilepsy established an expanded research team and in 2003, promotion to Associate Scientist. In early 2004, Henshall moved to RCSI as Senior Lecturer in Molecular Physiology & Neuroscience.

Prof Henshall has authored over 285 original articles and book chapters. He is author of the book Fine-Tuning Life: A guide to microRNAs, your genome's master regulators (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

He is the past-Chair of the International League Against Epilepsy's Neurobiology Commission and a Benchmark Steward for the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. He coordinated the European FP7 large-scale collaborative project EpimiRNA (2013 - 2018) and co-organised the international conferences EpiXchange I and II which brought together Europe’s major epilepsy research projects.

In 2017, he became Director of FutureNeuro, the Research Ireland Centre for Translational Brain Science. The Centre, hosted at RCSI, is an industry-academia partnership model working to translate findings for patient benefit and includes world-leading investigators in the areas of clinical neurology and psychiatry, genetics, materials science and digital health based across multiple irish universities including TCD, DCU, UCD, Galway, Maynooth, SETU and UCC.

In 2024, he was elected as a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), Ireland’s foremost body of experts in the sciences and humanities.