Senior Lecturer

Email: colm.okane@tudublin.ie

Dr Colm O’Kane is an engineer, designer and innovator.  He has extensive experience in turning technology into products in both academic and industrial sectors.  Projects he has supervised in TU Dublin have won national and international awards and been subsequently funded in excess of EUR1m.  In the industrial sector, he has developed products which have sold in excess of EUR50m.  In TU Dublin, Colm is chair of the University’s interdisciplinary Product Design programme. He currently supervises PhD candidates in the area of STEM education (as part of the EU funded SellSTEM project), product development and design identity and leads a collaborative project with McMaster University researching sustainable silicones. His primary areas of research interest and professional practice are innovation in products and systems, human-centred design and bioengineering. His engineering and design practice has spanned a number of industries from automotive to energy systems, medical devices and sporting goods.

Colm has supervised TU Dublin students to success in national and international competitions (Enterprise Ireland Student Enterprise, James Dyson Design, Network of International Business Schools, Engineers without Borders) on over thirty occasions and was awarded the Enterprise Ireland ‘Academic Excellence’ award in 2019. He has subsequently worked with organisations like Hothouse and Bolton Trust to further develop these projects into viable businesses. 

Colm was appointed Teaching Fellow in 2013, for work on the holistic development of curricula in Higher Education.  As TU Dublin Teaching Fellow in 2019, he worked to develop the Curriculum Framework for the new University. He is an active member of the SDG Literacy group based at TU Dublin which promotes sustainable development goals.  He was a mentor and tutor on the inaugural Climate Launchpad competition run by the EUT+ as part of the Climate KIC.  He also serves as Director of the Bolton Trust, a charitable organisation which promotes and facilitates Innovation, Enterprise and New Product Development within the Dublin region.

Colm completed his PhD at University College Dublin in 2012 in the area of bioengineering. In the course of this work, he was an ICUF Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.  He was Lead Engineer on the team in Race Face Performance Products (Vancouver, BC) which developed the technology behind the first-in-market Next range of hollow carbon fiber mountain bike cranksets.