James Walsh is founding senior director for research and innovation at Rutger New Brunswick, part of the State University of New Jersey, where he has responsibility for managing and developing collaborative and strategic relationships with the academic and healthcare research community. Rutgers’ focus is on establishing New Jersey as a premier U.S. innovation hub for biomedical research and training the next generation of healthcare innovators. He believes that the key to future medical success is international partnership programs – including significant new relationships with the world’s leading medical technology and healthcare innovation research community in Galway and the now globally recognized medical device innovation hubs in Ireland.

Walsh has had many healthcare focused roles on both sides of the Atlantic – he is the founding CSO of ImmunoGrow, an oncology cell the company based in Ireland and Princeton New Jersey, whose mission is to develop more affordable cell therapeutics to help enable broader patient access. He also worked with Mount Sinai Health System, NYC, to improve healthcare industry partnerships, and for many years with Enterprise Ireland, the Irish agency responsible for helping Irish companies succeed in global markets, where he focused on building life sciences and healthcare research and innovation capacity in the Irish university system.

Walsh’s research career started at the National University of Ireland, Galway as an undergraduate with Prof. Kieran L. Dunican, and continued at the University of Oxford with Prof. John Edwards, where he worked on inherited muscle wasting disorders. His Ph.D. work at both Imperial College, London and subsequent research career at the U.K. Medical Research Council focused on inherited forms of childhood deafness and blindness and on early development disorders. Here he and colleagues helped determine the causes of many of these very debilitating diseases. These discoveries led to multiple widely cited high impact publications in Nature. He was born in Galway and spent his formative years in the west of Ireland. He resides in Princeton, N.J. and in Dublin, Ireland, with his  beautiful wife Margaret Leahey, and sons  Ruairi and Fionn. ♦