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Dr. Belinda Hernández

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 “Statistical 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 haemodynamic signals; the development of statistical machine learning methods as well as research in areas such as multisensory integration, frailty and cognition.

Publications

Donoghue OA, Hernandez B, O’Connell MD, Kenny RA. 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, 2023 Apr;78(4):673-82
Setti A, Hernández B, Hirst RJ, Donoghue OA, Kenny RA, Newell FN. (2021). Susceptibility to the sound-induced flash illusion is associated with gait speed in a large sample of middle-aged and older adults. . Experimental Gerontology, 2023 Apr 1;174:112113
De Looze C, Dehsarvi A, Suleyman N, Crosby L, Hernández B, Coen RF, Lawlor BA, Reilly RB. (2021). Structural Correlates of Overt Sentence Reading in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild-to-Moderate Alzheimer's Disease. Current Alzheimer research, 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, 2022 p81 - 91
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
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
Belinda Hernandez, Siobhan Scarlett, Frank Moriarty, Roman Romero Ortuno, Rose Anne Kenny, Richard Reilly. (2021). Investigation of the role of sleep and physical activity for chronic disease prevalence and incidence in older Irish adults,. . BMC Public Health, (1), 2022, p1 - 11
Laird, E., O’Halloran, A., Molloy, A., Healy, M., Hernandez, B., O’Connor, D., Briggs, R. (2021). 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, 1-22. doi:10.1017/S0007114521004748
Davis, J.R.C., Knight S.P., Donoghue O. A., Hernández B, Rizzo, R., Kenny, R.A., Romero-Ortuno, R (2021), 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, 1, 2674-0109
Hernández, B., Voll, S., Lewis, N.A. et al. Comparisons of disease cluster patterns, prevalence and health factors in the USA, Canada, England and Ireland.DOI: 10.1186/s12889-021-11706-8 BMC Public Health 21, 1674 (2021).
Tonry C, McDonald K, Ledwidge M ,Hernández B, Glezeva, N, Rooney, C, Morrissey, B, Pennington SR, Baugh JA, Watson, CJ. Multiplexed measurement of candidate blood protein biomarkers of heart failure. Journal Article 2021; DOI: 10.1002/ehf2.13320 ESC Heart Failure(2021)
Romero-Ortuno, R, Hartley, P, Davis, J, Knight, SP, Rizzo R, Hernández B, Kenny RA, O'Halloran AM. Transitions in frailty phenotype states and components over 8 years: evidence from The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 2021 Journal Article, 2021 DOI: 10.1016/j.archger.2021.104401 TARA - Full Text .
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). DOI: 10.1093/ageing/afaa174 Age and Ageing 2020 Journal Article 2020 TARA - Full Text .
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. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2020.00261.Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, (261), 2020 Journal Article, 2020 TARA - Full Text.
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 Journal Article, 2020
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 2020 Journal Article, 2020
Hernández B, Setti A, Kenny RA, Newell FN, Individual differences in ageing, cognitive status, and sex on susceptibility to the sound-induced flash illusion: A large-scale study (2019) Psychology and Aging, 37(7) 978
Hernández B, Reilly RB, Kenny RA, Investigation of multimorbidity and prevalent disease combinations in older Irish adults using network analysis and association rules (2019) Scientific reports 9 (1), 1-12

BA McGivney BA, Hernández B, Katz LM, MacHugh DE, McGovern SP, Parnell AC, Wiencko HL, Hill EW, A genomic prediction model for racecourse starts in the Thoroughbred horse, Animal genetics 50 (4), 347-357

Gohar F, McArdle A, Jones M, Callan N, Hernández B, Kessel C, Miranda-Garcia M, Lavric M, Holzinger D, Pretzer C, Lainka E, Vastert SJ, de Roock S, FitzGerald O, Pennington SR, Foell D, Molecular signature characterisation of different inflammatory phenotypes of systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis, (2019) Annals of the rheumatic diseases 78 (8), 1107-1113

Oliveira IM, Hernández B, Kenny RA, Reilly RB (2019), 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), 2466-2469

Whelan D, Delahunt E, O'Reilly M, Hernández B, Caulfield B,Determining Interrater and Intrarater Levels of Agreement in Students and Clinicians When Visually Evaluating Movement Proficiency During Screening Assessments (2019), Physical therapy 99 (4), 478-486

Hernández B, Raftery A.E., Pennington S.R. and Parnell A.C., 2016, BART-BMA Bayesian Additive Regression Trees using Bayesian Model Averaging, 2017, Statistics and Computing, pp1-22
Rue-Albrecht K, McGettigan,P.A.,Hernández B, Parnell A.C., Gordon S.V. and MacHugh D.E., GOexpress: Visualise microarray and RNAseq data using gene ontology annotations, 2016, BMC Bioinformatics, 17 (1), pp 1
Hernández B, Parnell A.C. and Pennington S.R., Bayesian methods for the discovery of proteomic biomarkers, 2015, EuPA open Proteomics, 9, pp 54-64
Hernández B, Parnell A.C., Pennington S.R., Why have so few proteomic biomarkers ”survived” validation? (Sample size and independent validation considerations),2014, Proteomics, 14 (13-14), pp 1587-1592
Ademowo OS, Collins E, Hernández, B, Rooney C, van Kuijk A, Gerlag D, Tak PP, Fearon U, FitzGerald O and Pennington SR, Discovery and Confirmation of a Protein Biomarker Panel which Predicts Response to anti-TNF-alpha (Adalimumab) Therapy in Psoriatic Arthritis, Annals of Rheumatic Diseases, 2015, 75(1), pp 234-241
Ramm S, Morissey B, Hernández B, Rooney C, Pennington SR and Mally A, Application of proteomics to identify deregulated proteins associated with idiosyncratic liver toxicity in a rat model of LPS/Diclofenac co-administration, 2015, Journal of Toxicology, 331, pp 100-111
Hernández B, Lipkovich,I and O’Kelly M, 2014, Chapter 8:Doubly Robust Missing Data in Clinical Trials in Clinical Trials with Missing Data: A Guide for Practitioners, pp 370-407, Wiely, London
Staunton L, Clancy T, Tonry C, Hernández B, Ademowo S, Dharsee M, Evans K, Parnell AC, Tasken K, Watson W and Pennington S.R., 2014, Chapter 13:Protein Quantification by MRM for Biomarker Validation in New Developments in Mass Spectrometry, Quantatative Proteomics, pp 279-315, Royal Society Chemistry