Dr. Emer Smyth is a research associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania where she is a member of both the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics and the Cardiovascular Institute. Her current research targets how some anti-inflammatory drugs consistently reduce incidence, recurrence and/or mortality in breast and other cancers.

Among her many awards, most recently Emer received both a Translational Biomedical Imaging Center (TBIC) Pilot Award and the Joseph and Josephine Rabinowitz Award for Excellence in Research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine for the 2013-2014 academic year. She also served recently the vice chair of the Women’s Leadership Committee within the American Heart Association’s Council on Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology.

Emer has come a long way since she would work six days a week in her father’s Dublin butcher shop on winter and summer holidays. She was born and raised in Dublin and is an alumna of University College, Dublin for both her B.Sc. and Ph.D., but has now been out of the country for almost as long as she lived there. And yet, “although I carry an American passport and have American children,” she says, “I am now and always will be Irish. It is part of the very essence of who I am.” She and her husband have three children, Maeve, Fina, and Cormac.