Dr Donal Gallagher brings Radiation Protection capabilities to CRA

Donal has joined Corporate Risk Associates as a Junior Consultant. He previously worked as a production radiochemist for a radiopharmaceutical company which manufactures tracers used in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning. Through his role as a Radiation Protection Supervisor he was responsible for ensuring that safe practices were adhered to when handling and disposing of radioactive materials. He was also a member of a small team of experienced personnel charged with setting up and validating equipment and procedures at the company’s three facilities at Keele, Preston and Sutton.
Donal graduated with an honours degree in Experimental Physics from University College Dublin and then carried out  research into the use of radiocarbon dating to determine the age of Irish groundwaters, for which he was awarded an MSc. He received his PhD for research into scrutinising Irish environmental archives (peat, lake sediment and tree rings) to find evidence of the Windscale Fire of 1957 and its impact on Ireland. More recently, Donal graduated with an MSc in Nuclear Science and Technology from the University of Manchester (NTEC). The course was undertaken over a period of three years on a part-time basis and included courses on Nuclear Safety Case Development and Radiation Shielding. For his final year project and dissertation he used MCNP to model the neutron flux from a neutron tank at the University of Liverpool and compared the outputs from the model to neutron and gamma laboratory measurements.