Posted 11 February 2011
UCD receives first Wellcome Trust funding for Irish based PhD Programme: €3 million
For the first time in its history, the Wellcome Trust has announced funding for an Irish based PhD programme. The UK charitable foundation will provide upwards of €3 million towards a four-year structured PhD programme in Computational Infection Biology at University College Dublin.
The UCD PhD Programme will contribute to one of the Wellcome Trust’s major research challenges, namely to understand the emergence, transmission, pathogenesis and control of acute and chronic infectious diseases at the global level.
“The research programme will investigate the basis of pathogenicity and virulence in infectious organisms ranging from viruses (such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B, and influenza) to bacteria causing malaria, TB and other major diseases, and fungi, which grow on indwelling medical devices,” says programme director, Professor Geraldine Butler, UCD School of Biomolecular & Biomedical Science and UCD Conway Institute.
“The areas of investigation will include the host response to infection, identifying therapeutic targets and developing novel drugs. One aspect unique to University College Dublin is that the programme will investigate pathogenesis in both animals and man, addressing the ‘One World, One Health’ initiative, linking human, animal and environmental health.”
Advances in the development of new high-throughput scientific techniques have generated enormous amounts of data relevant to infectious disease research that is currently under-utilised, due to a lack of methodologies and suitably trained scientists.
The new UCD PhD programme aims to address this by equipping students with the skills necessary to negotiate the cultural and linguistic barriers that currently separate biological and computational research disciplines.
The Wellcome Trust
Founded under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936, the Wellcome Trust is dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. In pursuit of this, the Wellcome Trust supports the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities.
For more see: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk
PhD in Computational Infection Biology at UCD
Drawing on expertise from across five UCD Schools, the UCD Conway Institute, and the UCD Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL), the PhD programme will train scientists to integrate computational methods with biological research focused on infectious diseases.
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the UCD PhD programme in Computational Infection Biology will build on the success of the UCD PhD programme in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology funded by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology (IRCSET) since 2007, and also on individual research projects on infectious disease and bioinformatics funded by Science Foundation Ireland grants to participating investigators.
The director of the programme is Professor Geraldine Butler, UCD School of Biomolecular & Biomedical Science and UCD Conway Institute. The deputy director of the programme is Professor Denis Shields, UCD School of Medicine & Medical Science, UCD Conway Institute & UCD CASL.
For more on the programme and how to apply (deadline 18 March 2011) see: http://bioinfo-casl.ucd.ie/cib/
(Produced by UCD University Relations)
