Máire O'Neill

Máire Patricia O'Neill (; born 1978) is an Irish Professor of Information Security and inventor based at the Centre for Secure Information Technologies Queen's University Belfast. She was named the 2007 British Female Inventors & Innovators Network Female Inventor of the Year. She was the youngest person to be made a professor of engineering at Queen's University Belfast and youngest person to be inducted into the Irish Academy of Engineering.

Early life and education O'Neill is from Glenties. Her father, John McLoone, built a hydroelectric scheme on the Oweneda river, which was close to O'Neill's house, providing the family with free electricity. He was a vice-principal and maths teacher at Glenties Comprehensive School. She has lived in Belfast since she was a teenager.

She studied electronic engineering at Queen's University Belfast, and was sponsored by a local company to work on data security. She decided to stay on for a PhD in the architectures of data encryption. She was a PhD student working under the supervision of John McCanny at Queen's University Belfast. The AES circuit design developed by O'Neill improved hardware efficiency six-fold.

She earned her PhD in 2002, and was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship in 2003. With John McCanny, O'Neill wrote a book about system on a chip architectures for private-key data encryption.

Research and career In 2004 O'Neill was made a lecturer in Electronics, Communications and Information Technology at Queen's University Belfast. She worked on security systems to protect users from cyber threats, and was made Head of the Cryptography Research Team. Her research has considered the data security requirements that are associated with emerging applications of mobile computing. She worked on quantum dot cellular automata circuit design techniques, which are being considered as alternates to CMOS and have lower power dissipation. In 2013 O'Neill wrote the academic text book Design of Semiconductor QCA Systems, which was published by Artech House.

There is a region of China that produces 95% of the world's cultured freshwater pearls. Differentiating a real from a fake pearl can be challenging, and increasing numbers of counterfeit pearls are bankrupting Chinese pearl farmers. O'Neill devised an approach to determine whether or not a pearl is real using Radio-Frequency IDentification tags. O'Neill is also investigating ways to secure connected devices, the so-called internet of things. In 2017 she was made Director of the United Kingdom Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems, a £5 million centre in Belfast.

O'Neill is currently investigating post-quantum cryptography algorithms.

Academic service At the age of 32 O'Neill was the youngest person ever to be appointed a professor of engineering at Queen's University Belfast. She delivered a TED talk on the future of internet of things security at Queen's University Belfast in 2019. She has appeared on BBC World Service. She was elected to join the UK Artificial Intelligence council in May 2019.

In August 2019 O'Neill was appointed acting director of ECIT, the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology at Queen's University Belfast.

O'Neill has worked on improving gender balance in engineering throughout her career. She was the 2006 Belfast Telegraph schools lecturer, sharing her work on data encryption with hundreds of school children. 2006 Women's Engineering Society prize at the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year 2007 European Union Women Inventors & Innovators Innovator of the Year 2015 Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering 2014 Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal 2015 INVENT 2015 2019 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists 2019 Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2020 Regius Professorship

Personal life O'Neill is married to an electronic engineer, and they have three children. Her two brothers are both electronic engineers and her two sisters are medical doctors.