Congratulations to Aisling McMahon, who has recently been promoted to Professor in the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University.
Professor McMahon is a specialist in health law and intellectual property law. Her research focuses on the regulation of emerging health-technologies and biotechnologies, and the role of bioethical considerations within such contexts. Professor McMahon has published extensively in leading international specialist and generalist law journals in these fields including in the: Medical Law Review, Legal Studies, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC) and the Intellectual Property Quarterly. She has also published in leading international journals in other disciplines including: the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, New Genetics and Society, and the Journal of Medical Ethics. Professor McMahon’s work is widely cited nationally and internationally, particularly in the context of the role of intellectual property rights and access to health-technologies.
Professor McMahon’s work has been funded by sources including: the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, the Irish Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Society of Legal Scholars. In 2022, McMahon was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant (€1.5 million) for her project PatentsInHumans. Professor McMahon will lead a team of researchers under this five year project whose core aim will be to fundamentally reconceptualise the role of bioethics in the patenting and licensing of technologies related to the human body with the potential to generate significant scholarly and policy impacts.
Together with Professor Naomi Hawkins and Dr Karen Walsh, she co-founded the UK and Ireland Patent Scholar’s Network in 2019 which currently has over 40 members drawn from patent practice and academia in the UK and Ireland. Professor McMahon has been a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford (Caroline Miles Visiting Scholar), the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and the Hastings Center.
Professor McMahon is the second staff member in the School to win an ERC award in two years, following the success of Prof Delia Ferri in 2020.