PhD student, Louise Keegan receives the inaugural Crean travel bursary award for neurotherapeutics research

PhD student, Louise Keegan received the inaugural Crean travel bursary award at the 2025 UCD Conway Festival of Research & Innovation for her work on the impact of cocaine exposure on the development of the prenatal brain.

Cocaine addiction is a big problem around the world. When a pregnant woman uses cocaine, it can harm the baby’s growing brain. Babies exposed to cocaine before birth may have difficulties as they grow up with tasks like paying attention, solving problems, and using language. They are also more likely to develop mental health issues.

Scientists still do not fully understand how cocaine affects the baby’s brain as it is challenging to study unborn babies safely and ethically. 

As part of her doctoral studies, Louise Keegan uses a miniaturised and simplified model of the human brain called a cerebral organoid that has been grown in the laboratory from stem cells, a type of human cell that can develop into many different types of cells. This allows her to investigate the effects of cocaine on early human brain development.

Louise generated cerebral organoids to model two key developmental stages: day 36 representing the mid-first trimester, and day 147, corresponding to the mid-second trimester. 
The organoids were exposed to cocaine and analysed using genetic techniques called single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). 

The findings from this work indicate that prenatal cocaine exposure at specific timepoints caused disruptions in human brain development.

Louise Keegan is supervised by Conway Fellow, Prof. Keith Murphy from UCD School of Biomolecular & Biomedical Science based in UCD Conway Institute. Louise’s work was made possible by the development of the cerebral organoid model by Associate Professor John Crean and his group.

Eva and Chloe Crean present Louise Keegan with the Crean travel bursary award

There were 150 abstracts of research presented at poster review sessions during the 2025 UCD Conway Festival of Research & Innovation. Louise Keegan was commended for her work by a judging panel in the poster competition and was subsequently selected from 14 shortlisted PhD research posters for the inaugural Crean travel bursary award to communicate new findings on an international stage.

The Crean travel bursary award was inaugurated this year following the untimely death of Associate Professor John Crean, a lecturer in Pharmacology in the UCD School of Biomolecular & Biomedical Science and a Fellow of UCD Conway Institute. 

At the award ceremony, Professor Orina Belton, a colleague and close friend gave a brief speech in John’s memory. She described John as an exceptional scientist, educator and mentor who had a passion for travel. He inspired a new generation of scientists to explore their ideas no matter how impossible they may seem. 

John’s research focused on the repair of kidney cells that become damaged as a complication of uncontrolled diabetes. He was particularly interested in the possibilities presented by using stem cells to grow kidney organoids in the laboratory.

Using this approach, John’s group were able to gain a better understanding of how diabetes causes kidney disease, and to predict which cells will go on to cause kidney disease in diabetes patients by looking at the genes within the cells. With this information, John’s goal was to ultimately stop this disease process from occurring and possibly reverse and even repair the damage. 

This groundbreaking work led to John being awarded Research Ireland Frontiers for the Future Programme funding in 2020 for a 4-year project entitled Next Generation Therapeutics for Chronic Kidney Disease (NGENKID). Last year, he established a company of the same name based on the research from this project. His vision was to create a platform in which to genetically repair the kidneys of patients with polycystic kidney disease and provide a cure that currently does not exist.

Following the announcement of the winner by Prof. Orina Belton at the closing ceremony of the 2025 UCD Conway Festival on Thursday, 02 October, John’s daughters, Eva and Chloe Crean presented Louise Keegan with her award. They were joined by John’s wife, Catherine Moss, senior technical officer in the UCD Conway Genomics Core, his mother Maeve, siblings and extended family.