A Tuam professor in the USA is researching problems of fertility

‘OH gee, Hughie Keating’s daughter!” was the response from the Editor which I showed him a video of Associate Professor Aileen Keating of Iowa State University: College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. I had been researching Aileen in preparation for this article and calling out bits and pieces of information about this local woman.

By the time I’d watched her video (https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/akeating/) heard her wonderful local accent which reassured me that she had not become Americanised, I knew I would be able to have a friendly chat in spite of her numerous and inaccessible (to me) academic papers.

(For those of you interested in being impressed you can see Aileen’s papers by going to: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=dO9FEssAAAAJ.)

Aileen is from Belclare, went to Belclare National School, Presentation College Tuam, on to University College Galway (now NUIG) for her undergraduate degree 1994-’98 and to Coleraine for her Master’s.

“Coleraine opened my eyes to the outside world. The Omagh bomb was a few weeks before I moved up there. It’s a beautiful part of the country and I lived close to a beach.”

Then she got a fellowship from Teagasc which took her to their research institute in Fermoy where she did a doctorate: “it was there I learnt a lot about agriculture in a short time,” Aileen told The Tuam Herald. She moved to Canada in 2004.

Read the feature in this week's edition of The Tuam Herald, on sale in shops and online www.tuamherald.ie