29 Facts About Emma Teeling

Emma Caroline Teeling is an Irish zoologist, geneticist and genomicist, who specialises in the phylogenetics and genomics of bats.

Emma Teeling's work includes understanding of the bat genome and study of how insights from other mammals such as bats might contribute to better understanding and management of ageing and a number of conditions, including deafness and blindness, in humans.

Emma Teeling is the co-founder of the Bat1K project to map the genomes of all species of bat.

Emma Teeling is concerned with understanding of the places of bats in the environment and how to conserve their ecosystem.

Emma Teeling is widely cited in her areas of study and is an elected member of Ireland's national academy, the Royal Irish Academy.

Emma Teeling's father is an academic, and serial entrepreneur in the mining, Irish whiskey and other sectors, while her mother is an academic in the area of education; they married in 1971.

Emma Teeling has two younger brothers, Jack and Stephen, and she and her siblings grew up in Clontarf, where her father has his head office for multiple companies, and with her mother working in a school in nearby Coolock, another northern suburb of Dublin.

Emma Teeling attended Holy Faith Secondary School, Clontarf, and was the author of one of a set of short articles about late 1980s Moscow for a Soviet Supplement in the Irish Independent, after a school trip to the USSR.

Emma Teeling then saw an advertisement for PhD studies relating to bats, and pursued this from 1997 at Queen's University, Belfast and the University of California at Riverside.

Emma Teeling filed her thesis on A molecular perspective on chiropteran systematics in December 2001, and received her PhD in molecular phylogenetics from Queen's.

Emma Teeling worked as a postdoctoral research fellow from 2002 to 2004 at the US National Cancer Institute.

Emma Teeling founded the Laboratory of Molecular Evolution and Mammalian Phylogenetics at UCD in 2005, and the Centre for Irish Bat Research at UCD in 2008; she remains one of the four Principal Investigators of this cross-border project, and its director.

Emma Teeling is concerned with understanding of bat populations and their broader ecosystems, and bat conservation.

Emma Teeling was promoted to associate professor in 2012, and later to full professor.

Emma Teeling secured Science Foundation Ireland funding of over 200,000 euro for a study of the population dynamics and conservation status of a small bat, and a small grant for work around ecology and evolution with reference to bats.

Emma Teeling secured an award from the European Research Council, for a Starting Investigator work, supported by further SFI commitments.

Emma Teeling co-founded the Bat1K project to sequence the genomes of all living bat species.

Emma Teeling was elected to the highest academic honour in Ireland, membership of the national academy, the Royal Irish Academy, in 2016.

Emma Teeling's husband was made a Chevalier at the time, for his work in astrophysics.

Emma Teeling was invited to present her work on ageing at the Forum, where she delivered a presentation entitled Bats and the Secret of Everlasting Youth in a closed session in January 2020.

Emma Teeling has written and co-written many articles, papers and chapters, some of which are widely cited.

Papers which Emma Teeling has authored or to which she has contributed include:.

Emma Teeling is a member of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution and was a member of the society's 2012 Annual Meeting Committee, which managed the event in Dublin, Ireland and later a member of the society's governing council.

Emma Teeling is on the editorial board of one of the society's two journals, the Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Emma Teeling is a member of the editorial board of Oxford University Press's open-access journal Giga Science.

Emma Teeling was appointed to the board of the Irish Research Council.

Emma Teeling was elected as one of the professorial members of the Governing Authority of UCD in 2019, for a five-year term.

Emma Teeling has presented a TEDx talk, on the genome of bats, which has been viewed, as of 16 June 2022, more than 565,000 times.

Emma Teeling is married to astrophysicist Peter Gallagher, a senior professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and adjunct professor at Trinity College Dublin, at the latter of which he worked for many years.