Image: Shane O'Reilly
Combining chemistry, fieldwork and unpredictability, Dr Shane O’Reilly finds in his study of marine microbes the right cocktail to keep him drunk on research.
A huge driver for Dr Shane O’Reilly is the opportunity to make a positive impact with his research. In order to achieve this, he engages with people who may be affected by his research, even though it can often be a time-consuming process. He says this helps to “maximise the impact of research, encourage more engagement and interest in STEM as a process and a career”. And significantly, he believes it helps people develop an “appreciation and understanding of the natural world”.
O’Reilly is a chemistry professor in Atlantic Technological University (ATU), with more than 10 years of research experience and several funding awards under his belt. He completed a PhD in marine biogeochemistry in Dublin City University in 2013 and undertook postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University College Dublin.
Here, O’Reilly gives us an insight into his current research focus and the societal benefits he envisages.
Tell us about your current research.
My research currently focuses on applying molecular tools as diagnostic indicators or fingerprints for what’s happening in modern ecosystems and what happened in ancient ones by looking into the sedimentary and rock record. Essentially, I study the composition of organic matter in the environment, identifying compounds of use. It is perhaps like how a forensic scientist would work at a crime scene. The laboratory tools and instrumentation I gained skills in – chromatography and mass spectrometry – are so important in many areas of industry and society, so having these skills has allowed me to work on diverse research questions and collaborate with people from different fields.
I have studied organic compounds in dinosaur bones and other fossils, organics in rocks related to the origin of life, looked at carbon cycling below the seabed, historical marine pollution and even polar bear hairs!
Recently, my focus has turned towards coming up with new indicators to better monitor the health of soils and discovering new compounds from marine microbes that could benefit society. There is a diverse and talented team working on some of these projects, coming from China, US, Zimbabwe and Ireland. I am very excited and grateful for the opportunities to work on these projects and with passionate people.
In your opinion, why is your research important?
Humans will always use natural resources. By studying and highlighting problems or changes in the natural world and coming up with solutions, scientists will move our relationship from being an exploitative one to more of an informed, sustainable one.
While scientific advances happen with the activity of countless scientists over many years of hard work, the projects I am currently working on will come up with new ways to measure and monitor how well a soil is functioning and if we need to act or stop something.
My work will also help reveal the metabolic ingenuity of the unseen and unstudied microbial world and a pathway to new drugs and other beneficial natural products.
Ultimately, collective effort by scientists working in these areas will help us all be better stewards of our land and coasts. To try to accelerate this impact and make sure we go in the right direction, our team are engaging with relevant stakeholders and end users in society and industry.
What inspired you to become a researcher?
I always loved nature and the outdoors, so I think having some aspect of that in my career was inevitable for me. I had trouble deciding what I wanted to do while in school, as I wanted to try everything. In the end I dropped history (which I loved!) in the Leaving Cert and took up chemistry.
Studying chemistry for the first time was a spark for me; chemistry naturally sits at the intersection of biology and physics and has an appealing order and language to all of it. Biogeochemistry throws in geoscience, fieldwork, exploration and an unpredictability into the mix, which ticked all the boxes for me as an area to focus!
Science in many ways is just a systematic way of doing things and the scientific approach can be (and is) applied in so many areas. Even during the difficult, stressful times during my PhD or postdoctoral research, I always enjoyed coming into the lab in the morning to see how the data and results looked from an analysis or overnight experiment.
Interesting avenues and growth occur when an experiment fails, or you need to go back to the drawing board. Perhaps, as for an entrepreneur or an artist, the main limit as a researcher is your own mind (and work ethic), which is very exciting but can also be stressful. So, I became a researcher in my area because I love the way of working, the freedom to think of and test ideas, and to combine many technical subject areas to promote understanding of and appreciation for the natural world.
What are some of the biggest challenges or misconceptions you face as a researcher in your field?
There are certainly challenges and misconceptions. We are living in a time when human civilisation is having enormous and unprecedented negative impact on Earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and of course, the biosphere.
Sometimes I imagine the vast pristine natural landscapes and ecosystems – and financial cost to society – that would have been saved if environmental sciences knowledge and issues were more at the forefront of society and part of political decision-making in the 1980s or early ’90s. Earth, environmental and ecological sciences have not received enough research funding in most countries. Perhaps this is because the view is that is not directly tied with economic or technological development, which has been very short-sighted. It seems counter-productive to research and develop new technologies to solve problems we could have avoided in the first place. It’s a bit like not investing at all in preventative healthcare and trying to deal with medical problems at great expense later on.
There’s also a whole complex set of challenges around a lack of scientific literacy, engagement with STEM subjects and a lack of connectivity with the natural world in modern societies that is tied up with the climate and biodiversity crises. One misconception I see quite commonly is that many see research as a ‘Eureka’ breakthrough moment by a single bright mind. That has happened over the years, but research is normally slower and shared with often thousands of scientists working for many years, each incrementally building knowledge and taking steps towards breakthroughs in application and technology.
Do you think public engagement with science and data has changed in recent years?
Yes, I believe so. For example, the pandemic demonstrated the importance of science to humanity and exemplified the role played by universities in making scientific discoveries and how academic research helps industry and informs government. I would love to see journalists weave more chronological stories of the origins of some of these breakthroughs and feature unheralded people who worked on aspects of them along the way. I hope that all this translates to greater investment in science and higher education in Ireland and elsewhere.
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