Dr Ruth Houlihan is a research scientist at Tyndall National Institute, Ireland. She graduated from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1998 with a Mechanical Engineering degree, from University College Cork, Ireland in 2000 with a Masters in Engineering Science and in 2004 from the University of Southampton, UK with a Ph.D. in microsystems. She has worked over the years in inertial, RF and energy harvesting MEMS devices as device designer, process developer and device and system modeller. In particular, she has focused on the mechanical modelling of MEMS structures using finite element software. She has been PI for Enterprise Ireland funded projects, has worked on FP6 and FP7 European projects, ESA funded projects in addition to industrial contracts.