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Back to Dublin

A lot has happened these past few days. On Tuesday, we came back to Dublin, and visited The Royal Hospital to see their physiotherapy units. The Royal Hospital is the oldest operating hospital in Ireland. Their patients all vary in needs and disability level, but they all need some sort of rehab therapy. We were able to tour their facilities and interact with not only the PT’s, but also the OT’s.
It was a very different visit then what we had experienced, but it was great to see another one of Ireland's health care services. Wednesday was a crazy day. In addition to our scheduled programming of visiting with Dr. Emma Stokes, Associate Professor of the Department of Physiotherapy at Trinity, and going to see Riverdance at the Gaiety Theater, the Duke and Dutchess of Sussex were on the campus of Trinity to see the Book of Kells. We were able to make it into the public viewing section of campus, so we were able to see them.
Not only did we see them, but we got to shake their hands, and Dr. Rossetti had a nice conversation with Meghan. It was an amazing experience that we had no idea was going to happen. And to top it off, we all made the RTE news; one of the main news stations in Ireland!

One of the things I was most excited for on this trip happened on Thursday. We visited Trinity's School of Biochemistry and Immunology.We started out with getting an overview of their faculty and their respective research topics. They have over 200 researchers, this includes professors as well as undergraduate and graduate researchers. Overall, all their faculty bring in over €11 million in grants and private funding each year. The five main research themes they have are: immunology, cancer, metabolism, neurodegeneration and structural biology. After the lecture, we were able to have a tour of their facilities. All I can say is WOW! Everything was so new, state of the art and functional. We visited the teaching labs for general science, the physiology lab, and the anatomy lab.
It was interesting to see the differences between NIU's labs and Trinity's labs. My favorite part of the tour was seeing their microscopy lab. They have 3 confocal scopes and at least 5 high powered light microscopes! One theme that was across all of the labs was the integration of technology to make things easier and more cohesive. For example, in the physiology lab all of the equipment connects to the computer, so the data from a practice EKG automatically syncs up to the lab manual program they have. 




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