Professor Catherine Shanahan

Professor Shanahan was an early pioneer in the field of vascular calcification and made significant discoveries that have led to advances, not only in the mechanistic understanding of vascular ageing and calcification, but also to changes in clinical practice in patients with chronic kidney disease in the context of dysregulated mineral metabolism. Her work focuses on vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) and the role of nuclear lamina defects and the DNA damage response in driving vascular ageing and calcification. More recently she has focussed on epigenetics and the role of the extracellular matrix as a master regulator of VSMC phenotype utilising single-cell technologies to interrogate VSMC heterogeneity.