Biography | Sharon McGuinness — The Belfield Labs Where a Pharmacologist Took Her Doctorate

People who meet Sharon McGuinness as a chemicals regulator often skip the first laboratory.

She was trained as a pharmacologist, not as a lawyer.

University College Dublin records a B.Sc. with honours in pharmacology and chemistry in 1986.

The same faculty awarded her a Ph.D. in pharmacology in 1990.

Those degrees were taken on the Belfield campus, south of the city centre.

The Faculty of Science was the first to move here.

Its buildings opened in 1964, when UCD left the cramped Merrion Street laboratories that later became part of Government Buildings.

By the mid-1980s the science quadrangle was the ordinary workplace of an undergraduate chemist.

Official Irish and European biographies keep repeating the same two years because they are the hinge.

1986 is the first public qualification.

1990 is the doctorate that licensed the later toxicology fellowships.

The Health and Safety Authority later named a further post-doctoral year at the University of Arizona in Tucson and another at American Cyanamid in New York.

None of that happens without the Belfield thesis.

The O'Brien Centre that now dominates the science precinct opened only in 2013.

A visitor looking for her classroom will not find a plaque on a 1980s bench.

What still stands is the campus that received the science faculty first, and the fact that Ireland's later chemicals chief learned the subject here before she ever sat on a board in Helsinki.

Photo: Sarah777, 2 April 2005, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Geograph