Professor Gerard O’Keeffe is the Head of the Department of Anatomy & Neuroscience, Vice-Dean for Research and Innovation at College of Medicine and Health and a Fellow at the Centre for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland.

He graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD in Neuroscience from UCC after the award of a PhD fellowship from the Irish Research Council. He was a visiting researcher at the Karolinska institute in Sweden, which was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Biosciences in Cardiff University in the UK. He is a founding member of the Parkinson’s Disease Research Cluster (PDRC) and the Brain Development and Brain Repair Group  at UCC.

Professor O’Keefe  has received a number of fellowships and awards including UCC PhD Supervisor of Year in 2019. He serves as an elected member of governing body of the Anatomy Society which is one of the world’s oldest anatomical societies. He is also a member of NECTAR (Network of European CNS Transplantation and Restoration).

He sits on the editorial board of a number of journals including Neural Regeneration Research. His work has been featured in journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Brain, JAMA Psychiatry and Journal of Neuroscience.

Prof. O’Keeffe’s current research interests are focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate midbrain dopaminergic neuron development and degeneration and how these can be applied to developing new therapies for Parkinson’s disease.

Signature pedagogies are the precise forms of teaching and learning that define the fundamental educational framework that prepares students for a particular profession. They are the units of educational inheritance of the professions. But if they are to be a true unit of educational inheritance, they should continue to evolve and change to allow the professions to adapt to an ever changing world in which they are based. However this is not always the case.

Using a SoTL based approached my research interests are in mapping the existing signature pedagogies for the life sciences in medical education onto the teaching for understanding (TfU) framework. This approach allows the design of new signature pedagogies that map fully onto the TfU framework and are subject to a process of "educational natural selection". The impact of these changes in the context of fitness to practice is being assessed as students move through their medical education.