[3] She is known for her work in understanding how the genome is regulated, in particular to how developmental enhancers function, how they interact within three dimensional chromatin topologies and how they drive cell fate decisions during embryogenesis.
[8] Eileen Furlong obtained a Bachelor of Science degree at University College Dublin, and a PhD at the Conway institute at UCD, studying transcriptional regulation of immediate early response genes in the lab of Finian Martin.
[2] After her PhD, Furlong was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, in Matthew P. Scott's lab,[9] developing genomics tools to functionally dissect developmental programmes during embryogenesis.
Her research integrates genomics, genetics and computational biology approaches to functionally dissect the role of non-coding cis-regulatory elements in the regulation of gene expression.
[citation needed] Furlong’s work was credited in the development and application of genomic approaches to understand embryonic development,[28][29] including the development of Drosophila microarrays,[30][31] an automatic transgenic embryo sorter,[32][33] Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) in embryos,[34][35][36] tissue specific[37][38][39] and single cell approaches[40] - which combined with genetic manipulations provided insight into developmental programmes during embryogenesis at a genome-wide scale.