Professor Geraldine McCarthy is a Consultant Rheumatologist at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin and Professor of Medicine at University College Dublin. Geraldine undertook her Fellowship in Rheumatology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in the United States, where she developed her interest in calcium crystal deposition disease. Since then, she’s led studies into the biological effects of calcium-containing crystals in degenerative joint disease, atherosclerosis and breast cancer and has received research with funding from institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.

She continues to have a busy clinical practice at the Mater and Cappagh National Orthopaedic Hospitals in Dublin, and is involved in ongoing international collaborative research with colleagues all over the globe. In addition to her extraordinarily prolific output of publications, editorial, review, committee and mentoring work, Geraldine was President of the Irish Society for Rheumatology for four years until 2023, and has won many awards, including the RCPI Institute of Medicine Bryan Alton Medal. Most recently, Professor McCarthy received the designation of ‘ACR Master’ at the American College of Rheumatology Annual Scientific Meeting, the highest honour that the College (ACR) can bestow. Geraldine was one of only three people from Europe to receive the award at this year’s ceremony in San Diego and the only woman.

In this podcast, Professor McCarthy pays tribute to several mentors, including her dad, Dr Donal McCarthy, former County Physician in Laois, Dr Daniel J McCarty, ‘a giant of rheumatology’ in Wisconsin, and her husband, Dr Dermot Kenny, who taught her ‘how to deal with men’! She also waxes lyrical about a particularly important comrade, Ms Anne Madigan, one of Ireland’s first research nurses, she offers crucial advice to young medical women about strategic career planning, and she recalls some chastening advice she once received about the high price that doctors’ children may unexpectedly pay for their parents’ ‘greedy jobs’. There’s also some hot-off-the-press guidance about the practical management of gout, ‘the most common form of inflammatory arthritis in adult men’.

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