Research & Innovation

Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland-funded research centre for software, is set to join with Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering at the University of Maryland to collaborate on “extensive research” in the coming years.

Commenting on the new partnership, Lero researcher Prof Mike Hinchey said his group’s new partner offers “the global hallmark of excellence” in application-orientated research. “It is a tribute to our team of researchers in Ireland that the Fraunhofer Center is committing to this research partnership with Lero in areas of synergy. Fraunhofer research has been adopted by major US organisations, such as NASA and the Food and Drug Administration, amongst others.”

Prof Adam Porter, executive and scientific director at the Fraunhofer Center, said Lero’s “world class research centre” complements his own group’s areas of expertise.

Dublin City University has also said it is adding a new €5 million centre to develop ‘lab-on-a-chip’ technology for the life sciences sector, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT in Aachen, Germany. The aim of the new centre will be to focus on contract and collaborative research and projects addressing cost-efficient design, development and manufacture of microfluidic lab-on-a-chip designs.

Technologies like these have increased in applications in recent years, thanks largely to their flexibility and the rapidly decreasing cost of producing them.