Gavin graduated with a masters in chemical engineering from University College, Dublin in 1995. He then worked for several years as both an automation and a process engineer with design consultancies on a number of different projects in the microelectronics and pharmaceutical industries. He has been working as a full time lecturer in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Dublin Institute of Technology since 2002. He delivers modules in control, instrumentation and chemical engineering mostly through problem and project-based learning and has helped the school to transition more broadly to student-centred learning methods. He completed a Masters in Applied eLearning in 2009 and a PhD in 2017. His research area is the role of spatial cognition in STEM education covering topics such as exploring the role of spatial cognition in problem solving, investigating ways to develop spatial ability and how this can transfer to STEM learning and how to close the gender gap in spatial ability so that more young people, and girls in particular, are better prepared for STEM learning. He is coordinator and PI in SellSTEM, a MSCA ITN project worth over 4M euro that is examining the relationship between spatial ability and STEM learning and consists of 10 universities in 8 countries in Europe with 15 full time PhD students and a number of non-academic partners.

Spatial cognition, STEM education, gender studies