Irish Universities Association Welcomes Government Announcement of €12 Million Investment in Curiosity Driven Basic Research
The Irish Universities Association (IUA) has welcomed the announcement by Ministers Joe McHugh and John Halligan of €12 million investment by the Irish Research Council in ground-breaking, basic research projects. Twelve researchers will each receive a maximum of €1 million funding under the Irish Research Council’s Advanced Laureate Awards to conduct leading-edge research over four years in the Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering, the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Commenting on the announcement Dr. Lisa Keating, Director of Research and Innovation at the IUA said: “IUA would like to see these awards embedded as annual calls as they have the potential to improve Ireland’s performance and enhance the success of Ireland-based researchers in competing for prestigious grants from the European Research Council and in Horizon Europe.”
Commenting on the recently published socio-economic impact study of the seven IUA universities, Dr Lisa Keating said: “The independent Indecon assessment shows university R&D delivering an annual return to the economy of €1.5 billion. The high quality of research across the universities is evident again in the Laureate awards with 140 applications received of which 12 were awarded and another 48 were deemed excellent and fundable if budget was available.”
IUA is delighted that all recipients of the advanced Laureate awards come from four of our member universities including:
Maynooth University
- Patricia Palmer: ‘MACMORRIS (Mapping Actors and Contexts: Modelling research in Renaissance Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth century)’.
University of Limerick
- Michael Zaworotko: ‘Switching adsorbent layered materials’.
Trinity College Dublin
- Adrian Bracken: ‘Understanding the impact of divergent PRC2 complex assemblies on chromatin landscapes and gene regulation’.
- Lorraine O’Driscoll: ‘Extracellular vesicles in cancer’.
- Seamus Martin: ‘Death receptors as integrators of cell stress-induced inflammation’.
- Christine Casey: ‘Surface value: The agency and impact of craftmanship in the architecture of Britain and Ireland, 1680-1780’.
- Stefano Sanvito: ‘eMag: a computational platform for accelerated magnetic materials discovery’.
- Igor Shvets: ‘New concepts for superconducting tunnelling junctions’.
University College Cork
- John Atkins: ‘Codes within THE CODE: Revealing hidden genetic information’.
- Brendan Dooley: ‘Examining new sources for the European dimension of early modern news, integrating Ireland and elsewhere into the network of circulation, 1550-1700, to understand a forgotten but highly significant media landscape’.
- Pádraig Ó Macháin: ‘The materiality of the late-medieval Gaelic vernacular manuscript (1100–1600): a study of inks and vellum in the Book of Uí Mhaine, the development of a materiality protocol from that study, and the refinement of that protocol through application to other Gaelic manuscripts from the same era’.
- Colm O’Dwyer: ‘Battery performance in technicolor – photonic material circuitry and 3D printed batteries for probing electrochemical energy storage mechanisms and cell performance’.
