Ian Darragh

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Sports

Position: Tutor in Exercise Physiology

About Ian Darragh

A (northside) Dublin native, I began my academic career studying an undergraduate degree in Sports Science and Health at DCU. Here, I developed a specific interest in exercise physiology and scientific research through my experience of course material, volunteering for research studies and a completing research-based internship at the University of Cape Town. During my undergraduate studies, I also worked as a fitness instructor and competed internationally in the sport of Olympic Weightlifting, representing Ireland at the 2013 and 2014 Junior European Weightlifting Championships. The combination of these experiences was important for me, as I gained a joint appreciation for the mechanisms of acute and chronic responses to exercise, but also the necessity of translating this information into actionable principles that enhance clinical outcomes or sports performance.

Upon completion of my undergraduate studies, I enrolled in Trinity College (Dublin) where I successfully completed an MSc in Molecular Medicine – this degree gave me knowledge and experience in basic molecular sciences (biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology) and laid the technical and intellectual foundation for my doctoral studies. After my time at Trinity, I spent a year teaching full-time at the University of Limerick before receiving a Government of Ireland Postgraduate scholarship to return to DCU and begin my PhD studies. My doctoral work is in the discipline of molecular exercise physiology and concerns whether exercise training influences the presence of circulating ‘exercise factors’ and the bioactivity of blood plasma derived from athletes on the proliferation of cancer cells. I aim to complete my PhD in the summer of 2023.

Ian’s Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy revolves around prompting students to learn to think about how the components of problems work and developing principles based on this knowledge that is useful in the solving of real-world problems. In other words, I do not think that there is value in being able to memorise and recite endless lists of materials, reactions or rates. Instead, I believe that gaining a general understanding of how a system functions (e.g. the human body) enables the ability to predict how that system may change in response to different scenarios (like exercise training) and that this combined knowledge can then be aggregated into principles that are actionable and problem-solving in nature (for tasks like designing exercise training programs).

Qualifications