Biography
Dr Belinda Hernandez is a Senior Research Fellow and bio-informatician for TILDA (The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing) in Trinity College Dublin. Belinda"s current research interests are focused on using advanced statistical and machine learning methods to develop physiological and epigenetic biomarkers for healthy ageing and multimorbidity prevention. Previous to this, she was an Assistant Professor in Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University College Dublin where she developed proteomic and genomic biomarkers for various diseases such as prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease and arthritis. She holds a PhD in "Bayesian Machine Learning for Proteomic Discovery and Validation" from University College Dublin.
Although focused primarily on biomarker development her research is multidisciplinary, and she has conducted comparative research of multimorbidity clusters and epigenetic markers of health outcomes across multiple international studies of ageing. She has also published research in a number of other areas including the investigation of high dimensional cardiovascular and neurovascular hemodynamic signals; the development of statistical machine learning methods as well as research in areas such as multisensory integration, frailty and cognition.
Publications and Further Research Outputs
Peer-Reviewed Publications
A., Shirsath M., O'Connor J.D., Boyle R., Newman L., Knight S.P., Hernandez B., Whelan R., Meaney J.F., Kenny R.A., Slower speed of blood pressure recovery after standing is associated with accelerated brain aging: Evidence from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), Cerebral Circulation - Cognition and Behavior, 6, 2024
Belinda Hernández, Adam H Dyer, Ciaran Finucane, Bernardo Nipoti, Roman Romero-Ortuno, Richard Reilly, Rose Anne Kenny, The Impact of Type 2 Diabetes on Peripheral and Cerebral Haemodynamic Responses to Active Stand, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 2024
A Setti and B Hernández, RJ Hirst, OA Donoghue, RA Kenny, FN Newell, Susceptibility to the sound-induced flash illusion is associated with gait speed in a large sample of middle-aged and older adults, EXPERIMENTAL GERONTOLOGY, 174, (112113), 2023
Belinda Hernández, Siobhán Scarlett, Frank Moriarty, Roman Romero-Ortuno, Rose Anne Kenny, Richard Reilly, Investigation of the role of sleep and physical activity risk for chronic disease prevalence in older Irish adults, BMC Public Health, 2022
Kevin McCarthy, Eamon Laird, Aisling M. O"Halloran, Cathal Walsh, Martin Healy, Annette L. Fitzpatrick, James B. Walsh, Belinda Hernandez, Padraic Fallon, Anne Molloy, Rose Anne Kenny, Association between vitamin D deficiency and the risk of prevalent type 2 diabetes and incident prediabetes: A prospective cohort study using data from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), eClinical Medicine, 53, 2022, p101654
Mc Ardle A, Kwasnik A, Szenpetery A, Jones M, Hernandez B, Meenagh M, Parnell A, de Jager W, de Roock S, Fitzgerald O, Pennington S , Identification and Evaluation of Serum Protein Biomarkers Which Differentiate Psoriatic from Rheumatoid Arthritis., Arthritis & Rheumatology, 74, (1), 2022, p81 - 91
Céline De Looze, PhD, Wilby Williamson, PhD, Naiara Demnitz, PhD, Deirdre O'Connor, MPH, Belinda Hernández, PhD, Rose Anne Kenny, MD, Physical Function, An Adjunct to Brain Health Score for Phenotyping Cognitive Function Trajectories in Older Age: Findings From The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), The Journals of Gerontology: Series A Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 2022
Orna A Donoghue, Belinda Hernandez, Matthew DL O"Connell, Rose Anne Kenny, Using Conditional Inference Forests to Examine Predictive Ability for Future Falls and Syncope in Older Adults: Results from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 2022
De Looze C, Dehsarvi A, Suleyman N, Crosby L, Hernández B, Coen RF, Lawlor BA, Reilly RB., Structural Correlates of Overt Sentence Reading in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild-to-Moderate Alzheimer's Disease., Current Alzheimer research, 2022
McCrory C, Fiorito G, Hernandez B, Polidoro S, O'Halloran AM, Hever A, Ni Cheallaigh C, Lu AT, Horvath S, Vineis P, Kenny RA., GrimAge outperforms other epigenetic clocks in the prediction of age-related clinical phenotypes and all-cause mortality., The Journals of Gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences, 76, (5), 2021, p741 - 749
Roman Romero-Ortuno, Peter Hartley, James Davis, Silvin P. Knight, Rossella Rizzo, Belinda Hernández, Rose Anne Kenny, Aisling M. O'Halloran, Transitions in frailty phenotype states and components over 8 years: evidence from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 2021
James R. Davis, Silvin P. Knight, Orna A. Donoghue, Belinda Hernández, Rossella Rizzo, Rose Anne Kenny, Roman Romero-Ortuno, Comparison of gait speed reserve, usual gait speed, and maximum gait speed of adults aged 50+ in Ireland using explainable machine learning, Frontiers in Network Physiology: Networks in Aging and Frailty, 2021
Eamon Laird and Aisling M. O'Halloran and Anne M Molloy and Martin Healy and Belinda Hernandez and Deirdre O'Connor and Rose Anne Kenny and Robert Briggs, Low vitamin B12 but not folate is associated with incident depressive symptoms in community-dwelling older adults: a 4 year longitudinal study, British Journal of Nutrition, 2021, p1--22
Claire Tonry, Ken McDonald, Mark Ledwidge, Belinda Hernandez, Nadezhda Glezeva, Cathy Rooney, Brian Morrissey, Stephen R Pennington, John A Baugh, Chris J Watson, Multiplexed measurement of candidate blood protein biomarkers of heart failure, ESC heart failure, 2021
Moloney D, O'Connor J, Newman L, Scarlett S, Hernandez B, Kenny RA, Romero-Ortuno R, Clinical clustering of eight orthostatic haemodynamic patterns in The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), Age and Ageing, 50, (3), 2021, p854 - 860
Hernández B, Voll S, Lewis NA, McCrory C, White A, Stirland L, Kenny RA, Reilly R, Hutton CP, Griffith LE, Kirkland SA, Terrera GM, Hofer SM., Comparisons of disease cluster patterns, prevalence and health factors in the USA, Canada, England and Ireland., BMC Public Health, 21, (1), 2021, p1674
Prado EB, O'Neill E, Hernandez B, Parnell AC, Moral RA, Discussion: Bayesian Regression Tree Models for Causal Inference: Regularization, Confounding and Heterogeneous Effects, Bayesian Analysis, 15, (3), 2020, p955 - 1056
O'Connor JD, O'Connell MD, Romero-Ortuno R, Hernandez B, Newman L, Reilly R, Kenny RA, Knight SP, Functional Analysis of Continuous, High-Resolution Measures in Ageing Research: A Demonstration using Cerebral Oxygenation Data from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, section Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, (261), 2020
Faekah Gohar, Angela McArdle, Melissa Jones, Niamh Callan, Belinda Hernandez, Christoph Kessel, Maria Miranda-Garcia, Miha Lavric, Dirk Holzinger, Carolin Pretzer, Elke Lainka, Sebastiaan J Vastert, Sytze de Roock, Oliver FitzGerald, Stephen R Pennington, Dirk Foell, Molecular signature characterisation of different inflammatory phenotypes of systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis, Annals of the rheumatic diseases, 78, (8), 2019, p1107 - 1113
IM Oliveira, B Hernández, RA Kenny, RB Reilly, Automatic Disability Categorisation based on ADLs among Older Adults in a Nationally Representative Population using Data Mining Methods, 2019 41st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2019, p2466-2469
Hernández B, Reilly R, Kenny RA, Treat people not diseases: A pattern analysis of disease interactions in multimorbidities. Results from The Irish Longitudinal study in Ageing, Scientific Reports, 9, (1), 2019, p1 - 12
Darragh Whelan, Eamonn Delahunt, Martin O'Reilly, Belinda Hernandez, Brian Caulfield, Determining Interrater and Intrarater Levels of Agreement in Students and Clinicians When Visually Evaluating Movement Proficiency During Screening Assessments, Physical therapy, 99, (4), 2019, p478-486
Belinda Hernández, Annalisa Setti, Rose Anne Kenny, Fiona N Newell, Individual differences in ageing, cognitive status, and sex on susceptibility to the sound-induced flash illusion: A large-scale study., American Psychological Association, 34, (7), 2019, p978
BA McGivney, B Hernandez, LM Katz, DE MacHugh, SP McGovern, AC Parnell, HL Wiencko, EW Hill, A genomic prediction model for racecourse starts in the Thoroughbred horse, Animal genetics, 50, (4), 2019, p347 - 357
Belinda Hernández, Adrian E Raftery, Stephen R Pennington, Andrew C Parnell, Bayesian additive regression trees using Bayesian model averaging, Statistics and computing, 28, (4), 2018, p869-890
Ademowo OS, Hernandez B, Collins E, Rooney C, Fearon U, van Kuijk AW, Tak PP, Gerlag DM, FitzGerald O, Pennington SR, Discovery and confirmation of a protein biomarker panel with potential to predict response to biological therapy in psoriatic arthritis., 2016
Kévin Rue-Albrecht, Paul A McGettigan, Belinda Hernández, Nicolas C Nalpas, David A Magee, Andrew C Parnell, Stephen V Gordon, David E MacHugh, GOexpress: an R/Bioconductor package for the identification and visualisation of robust gene ontology signatures through supervised learning of gene expression data, BMC bioinformatics, 17, (1), 2016, p126
S Ramm, B Morissey, B Hernandez, C Rooney, SR Pennington, A Mally, Application of a discovery to targeted LC-MS proteomics approach to identify deregulated proteins associated with idiosyncratic liver toxicity in a rat model of LPS/diclofenac co-administration, Toxicology, 331, 2015, p100-111
Hernández B, Parnell A.C. and Pennington S.R. , Bayesian methods for the discovery of proteomic biomarkers, EUPA Open Proteomics, 9, 2015, p54-64
Belinda Hernández, Andrew Parnell, Stephen R Pennington, Why have so few proteomic biomarkers "survived" validation?(Sample size and independent validation considerations), Proteomics, 14, (13), 2014, p1587-1592
Doubly Robust Missing Data in Clinical Trials in, Clinical Trials with Missing Data: A Guide for Practitioners, pp 370-407, London, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014, pp279-315 , [Belinda Hernández, Ilya Lipkovich, Michael O'Kelly]
Protein Quantification by MRM for Biomarker Validation in, New Developments in Mass Spectrometry: Quantative Proteomics, Royal Society of Chemistry, 2013, pp279-315 , [L. Staunton, T. Clancy, C. Tonry, S. Ademowo, M. Dharsee, B. Hernandez, K. Evans, Parnell A, R.W. Watson, S.R. Pennington]
Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications
Lorna Roe, Christine McGarrigle, Belinda Hernández, Aisling O'Halloran, Siobhan Scarlett, Mark Ward, Charles Normand, Rose Anne Kenny, PATTERNS IN HEALTHCARE UTILISATION: RESULTS FROM WAVE 5 OF THE IRISH LONGITUDINAL STUDY ON AGEING., 2020
Belinda Hernández, Donal Sexton, Frank Moriarty, Niall Cosgrave, Aisling O'Halloran, Christine McGarrigle, Siobhan Scarlett and Rose Anne Kenny, HIGH-RISK CATEGORIES FOR COVID-19 AND THEIR DISTRIBUTION BY COUNTY IN REPUBLIC OF IRELAND-EVIDENCE FROM THE TILDA STUDY, 2020
Kenny, R.A., Hernandez, B., O'Halloran, A., Moriarty, F., McGarrigle, C., TILDA report to inform demographics for over 50s in Ireland for COVID-19 crisis, Dublin, The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, Trinity College Dublin, March, 2020
Research Expertise
Projects
- Title
- FRAILMatics: Mathematical research and big data analytics towards the development of the next generation of transdisciplinary diagnostics for the assessment of physiological vulnerability in older adults: challenge-based disruptive technology initiative
- Summary
- Role: Coapplicant, 1,200,000eur Summary: Increasing numbers of older people are living with frailty. Frailty is defined as dysregulation in multiple physiological systems andconsequent reduction in physiological reserve. A frail person is vulnerable to decompensate and experience adverse healthoutcomes in the face of stressors. The higher the number of physiological systems that are dysregulated, the less physiologicalreserve. Despite consensus in the concept, frailty operationalisations in clinical practice are limited and a universally accepteddiagnostic method does not exist. However, there is evidence that early recognition of frailty could prevent or delay adverseoutcomes. The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) has collected detailed information on real-time functioning ofphysiological systems, with and without challenge: neurological (choice reaction time, sustained attention to response task,cerebral blood flow before and after standing), cardiovascular (continuous blood pressure and heart rate, before and afterstanding), and locomotor (gait with and without cognitive challenges). For this research, TILDA will offer the opportunity to hostinfrastructure and capacity in mining, processing and modelling its largely unexplored complex and computationally expensive "bigdata". We aim to discover new frailty signals and models, validate them in clinical cohorts, and lead towards new diagnostic toolsto help tackle the ageing challenge.
- Funding Agency
- SFI
- Date From
- 01/12/2019
- Date To
- 01/12/2024
- Title
- High Dimensional Forest Models for Genetic Performance Evaluation
- Summary
- Role Co-Applicant Awarded 135,000eur for the development and commercialisation of proprietary algorithms and software solutions for creating and improving genomic tests and breeding programmes for thoroughbred animals. This resulted in being awarded the "Venture Launch Start Up of the Year Award" for our commercialisaton venture Prolego Scientific.
- Funding Agency
- Enterprise Ireland
- Date From
- 22/2/17
- Date To
- 22/2/19
- Title
- 'Investigating novel biomarkers of cardiac arrhythmia and associated risk of stroke and heart failure
- Summary
- Role: Coapplicant Amount: 60,000 GBP
- Funding Agency
- Northern Ireland Chest
- Date From
- 1/9/2020
- Date To
- 1/3/2022
- Title
- Developing novel early physiological biomarkers of autonomic dysregulation contributing to mortality risk.
- Summary
- Role: PI Amount: $23328
- Funding Agency
- NIA
- Title
- CLEC3B - a novel biomarker for heart failure: cohort evaluation and development of a point of care prototype
- Summary
- Role: Co-Applicant Amount: £85525
- Funding Agency
- Northern Ireland Chest Heart & Stroke Project
- Title
- Unravelling the effects of ageing on the type I interferon anti-viral response
- Summary
- Role: Collaborator Amount: 2,016,915eur
- Funding Agency
- Wellcome Trust
Recognition
Awards and Honours
Finalist European Data Science and AI Awards
Venture Launch Start Up of the Year Award (20,000eur)