Professor Ellis read History at Manchester University before working at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University, Belfast. He joined the History Department in Galway in 1976 and was appointed to his present post in 1991. He became Head of History in 2004.

Ellis's writings have been published in eight countries and in six languages. His early work focused on English society and institutions in Ireland. His Master's thesis, on the Kildare rebellion, 1534-35 (Manchester, 1974), underpinned many early publications on noble power and royal government. His doctoral dissertation (Belfast, 1979) was inspired by Sir Geoffrey Elton.s work on Tudor government and was later published as Reform and Revival: English Government in Ireland, 1470-1534 (Royal Historical Society, 1986). A prominent aspect of his research since the mid-1980s has been the development of perspectives on Irish history in a British context and on Ireland as one of the Tudor borderlands. These perspectives were first explored in Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures 1470-1603 (Longman Group Limited, 1985), long the standard survey of Tudor Ireland, and were recognised by the National University of Ireland with the award of a second doctorate (D.Litt., 1988). More recently, he has also worked on his native north of England and on British state formation more generally. This work prompted a pioneering comparative analysis of marcher lordship and frontier society, Tudor frontiers and noble power: the making of the British state (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995). His Ireland in the age of the Tudors: English expansion and the end of Gaelic rule, 1447-1603 (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998) is a heavily revised version of Tudor Ireland, with three additional chapters, and more recently he has published a comparative survey of The making of the British Isles: the state of Britain and Ireland,1450-1660 (Pearson Education, 2007).

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Dr. Nathan Quinlan is a senior lecturer in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Informatics, and a Principal Investigator in the Biomechanics Cluster of NCBES. His main research interests are in the development of computational and experimental methods for fluid dynamics, particularly for the role of flow in the functioning of the human body and in medical devices.

One major goal of this research is to understand the behaviour of blood flow in devices such as stents and prosthetic heart valves. Experimental, computational and analytical models are used to explore the effects on blood cells of turbulence created by these devices. The long-term goal is to improve device design to create blood flows that are less likely to cause disease. Research is also underway on the flow of air in the lung in mechanical ventilation.

A second major area is the development of computational techniques for simulation of fluid flow in biomedical and other applications. His group is working on mesh-free methods (smoothed particle hydrodynamics and the finite volume particle method) in which fluid is treated as a set of virtual moving particles, in contrast with the conventional approach in which space is subdivided into a mesh of cells. NUI Galway is a partner in the European NextMuSE project, which aims to exploit these methods to simulate complex problems in engineering - including blood flow in artificial heart valves - in a highly interactive environment supported by high-performance computing. His research has been funded by PRTLI, SFI, IRCSET, Enterprise Ireland and the European Commission.

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