Professor Deirdre Ahern is a distinguished legal scholar specializing in corporate law, governance, and technology. She serves as the Director of Research at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, and is also the Director of the Technologies, Law and Society Research Group. In the academic year 2023/2024, she is a visiting fellow at the European University Institute and the University of Florence.

A graduate of both Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, Professor Ahern has held visiting positions at Cambridge University and Duke University. She was also a visiting professor at the Duke-Geneva Transnational Law Institute. Before her academic career, she worked as a commercial solicitor with A&L Goodbody and KPMG and served as a principal officer with the Law Reform Commission.

Her research is primarily focused on comparative corporate law, corporate governance and Artificial Intelligence. She has published extensively in reputable journals such as the Law Quarterly Review, the Modern Law Review, and the European Company and Financial Law Review. Her current research project is “The Changing Face of Directors’ Duties in the EU: Making Companies Responsible for Sustainability and Human Rights across Global Supply Chains.”

Professor Ahern is an active member of Ireland’s Company Law Review Group for 2022-2026 and serves on the European Commission’s Informal Company Law and Corporate Governance Expert Group for 2020-2024. She is also a member of the League of European Research Universities’ Legal Team on Artificial Intelligence.

She has received several honors, including being shortlisted for the Kevin Boyle Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. She was elected to the Fellowship of Trinity College in 2012 and was appointed to the Royal Irish Academy’s Ethics, Politics, Law, and Philosophy Committee in 2022.

Professor Ahern welcomes PhD and post-doctoral research candidates in the areas of company law, directors’ duties, sustainable corporate governance, and regulation of artificial intelligence.