Marcus is a Lecturer in the School of Microbiology, University College Cork. Marcus did his BSc in Chemical Engineering and MSc in Bioinformatics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. After his MSc Thesis project at AstraZeneca Mölndal, he worked at the start-up biotechnology company AngioGenetics. This was interrupted by the opportunity to start a PhD at the Microbiology Department at University College Cork, where the main part of the project was dedicated to sequence and analyse a commensal Lactobacillus strain. Once completed in Oct 2006, Marcus worked for at the campus-based biotechnology company Alimentary Health, data mining bifidobacteria for beneficial probiotic traits. This was followed by a longer postdoctoral position in Prof. Paul O’Toole’s lab in the Microbiology Department, focusing on the bioinformatics involved in the ELDERMET metagenomics project aiming to sequence the gut-bacteria of hundreds of elderly Irish citizens.
Since 2012 Marcus is a Principal Investigator at UCC, as well as a Funded Investigator at the APC managing the BioIT platform. His main research interests in the role of microbiota in inflammatory bowel disease, and methods development for various ‘omics’ technologies. He is also coordinating the MSc programme in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and lectures on the subject to MSc and 4th-year Microbiology and Genetics students.