About
Dr
Marion McAfee
Funded Investigator
ATU
Dr Marion McAfee has 15 years’ experience in the development of novel instrumentation, modeling and control solutions for polymer and biomaterial processing to improve product quality, enhance process efficiency and reduce waste. She has been the Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on externally funded grants totalling over €4 million awarded by the EPSRC, Royal Society, EU Framework Programme, SFI and Enterprise Ireland. She is a member of the European Materials Modelling Council (EMMC), where she sits on the Expert Group for Translation, which promotes the application of materials modeling to solving industry problems. She has worked with over 20 industrial partners from across Europe on delivering solutions to reduce downtime, reduce energy consumption, improve product quality and reduce scrap on a range of polymer and medical device manufacturing processes.
Research Interests (Lay Summary)
Marion’s research interests are in modeling, optimisation and control of manufacturing processes to improve product quality, enhance process efficiency and reduce waste. Her research has been motivated by improving sustainability and quality of life. Her research has been applied to reducing waste and energy consumption in the production of plastic products, including making it more feasible to produce high-quality products from recycled plastics. Much of her recent research relates to the manufacture of implantable polymeric medical devices. These can be very expensive to produce, which limits their availability to patients despite their potential benefits. Marion’s research aims to reduce the manufacturing cost of such devices and hence make them more widely available to patients.