Bio: Dr Lynette Keeney is a Principal Scientist at the Tyndall National Institute, University College Cork, Ireland, specialising in the synthesis and study of room temperature multiferroic thin films for next-generation data storage applications. She earned her PhD in inorganic chemistry from the National University of Ireland, Galway (2005), where she received five University awards. Before joining Tyndall in 2008, Dr Keeney worked as a chemist at Charles River Laboratories, Pre-clinical Services, Montreal Inc.).

Dr Keeney is the Chair of the European Conference on Applications of Polar Dielectrics (ECAPD) and serves as the Ferroelectrics Women in Engineering Chair for the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society. She is actively involved in science outreach, including school visits, public events, and work experience programmes.

Dr Keeney holds the prestigious Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate award (2023) and has received multiple Royal Society-Science Foundation Ireland University Research Fellowships  (2015, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022). In 2015, she was recognised as University College Cork’s Early-Stage Researcher of the Year.

Through her Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate, Royal Society Awards, and Science Foundation Ireland-awarded Frontiers for the Future Project (2020), Dr Keeney is expanding her research team to investigate how sub-unit cell characteristics affect multiferroic behaviour and emergent topologies. Her current research explores whether these promising multiferroic properties can persist at near-unit-cell thicknesses.