Emma Caroline Teeling[1] MRIA is an Irish zoologist, geneticist and genomicist, who specialises in the phylogenetics and genomics of bats.

She has two younger brothers, Jack and Stephen, and she and her siblings grew up in Clontarf, where her father has his head office for multiple companies,[4] and with her mother working in a school in nearby Coolock,[5] another northern suburb of Dublin.

in Animal Behaviour and Welfare, from 1995, including working with swift foxes[8] at the Cochrane Ecological Institute in Canada.

In 2005, she returned to Ireland to take a role as lecturer in Evolution and Genetics in the School of Biology and Environmental Science at UCD, securing tenure in 2006.

[17] Over the first 15 years since doctoral qualification, Teeling secured more than 4.4 million euro in research funding for her projects and laboratories.

[19] Teeling secured an award from the European Research Council, for a Starting Investigator work (2013-2018),[2] supported by further SFI commitments.

[20] This resulted in the Ageless project, considering how bats weighing as little as 7g can live for over 40 years, possibly due to optimised telomere management.

[23][24] A report from this project, looking at the genomes of six bat species and mentioning Teeling and a colleague, was featured on the front cover of Nature magazine in 2020;[25] this recognition was highlighted by the official University College Dublin Facebook page as "Congratulations to UCD's resident Batlady Prof Emma Teeling on making the cover of this month's @Nature with her newest genomic research.

[27] Teeling attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) conference in Davos, Switzerland in 2020 as a top level academic/think tank advisor.

[30] After Davos, in late February 2020, Prof Teeling was invited as one of the speakers at the week-long Genomics Winter School within the Future Biotech Winter Retreat in Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia,[31] and to the leading genetic and cytological research facility of the Russian Federation, where she presented, and performed a "Q&A" session, on bats and longevity.

They lived near Washington D.C. for part of their time in the US during advanced studies, before moving back to Ireland together when Teeling received a job offer from UCD.