Dr. Whelan carried out a Bachelor of Science in Cell and Molecular Biology at University College Dublin, focusing on quantitative microscopy of membrane trafficking and perturbation of Golgi morphology in mammalian cells. Upon graduating in 2015, he was awarded the Government of Ireland PhD Research Scholarship (IRC), allowing him to undertake a PhD project of his own design. This student led award afforded him the opportunity to shift his research focus toward investigating the relationship between intracellular microbial pathogens and their hosts. During his PhD, he applied High Content Screening (HCS) microscopy approaches to investigate the effect of DNA supercoiling mediated epigenetic regulation on biofilm formation and host-cell entry by the pathogen Campylobacter jejuni. In 2020, he joined the Division of Infection and Immunity (I&I) in UCL as a Research Fellow in ‘HCS Microscopy and Image Analysis’. Under the supervision of Prof. Madhad Noursadeghi, he developed the ‘Host-Pathogen Microscopy Core’ facility, with the primary goal of providing cutting edge HCS and super-resolution microscopy and quantitation of host cell responses to viral and bacterial infections. He is also currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory of Prof. Clare Jolly in I&I. His own research focuses on the application of live cell and super-resolution approaches to investigate the kinetics of HIV nuclear entry in primary T cells.