Government of Ireland awards - 69 UCD postgrad and postdoc researchers receive funding

Posted 14 October, 2021

Some 69 postgrad and postdoc researchers at University College Dublin have been awarded funding under the Irish Research Council’s flagship ‘(opens in a new window)Government of Ireland’ scheme.

An investment of €28 million in funding for 330 research projects under the programmes was made; 254 postgraduate scholarships and 76 postdoctoral fellowships - the highest number of awardees yet announced.

A total of 69 awards were granted to successful UCD research applicants, including 49 postgraduate awards and 20 postdoctoral fellowships.

UCD Postgraduate Awards

• Adam Cruise: Merging Light-Driven Flow Chemistry and Machine Learning for the Sustainable Production of Pharmaceuticals
• Alessandro Guardascione: Values and Selfhood in Psychopathology: A Phenomenological Account
• Alma Buholzer: Kant's Theory of Representation
• Candace Thomas: Displacement to Placemaking: How the Kurdish Alevi, Iraqi Yazidi and Irish Travellers navigate identity and change over time, space and place.
• Candi Stumpf: Investigation of SARS-CoV-2-host cell interactions; alternative viral entry routes and signalling in immune cells
• Chanyu Yang: (Met Éireann Postgraduate Scholarship) Flood Inundation Forecasting using Machine Learning and Remote Sensing
• Chi Nguyen Mai: Writing Home? Haiti and Vietnam in Postcolonial Autofiction in French
• Christina Seery: Understanding and Managing Adult ADHD Programme (UMAAP): Development and evaluation of an App and group psychoeducation workshops with ADHD-Ireland to support the HSE National Clinical Programme for ADHD in Adults.
• Ciara Mc Mahon: Modelling Lennox Gastaut Syndrome using patient-derived cerebral organoids
• Ciara Walsh: Investigating the use of responsive hydrogels as therapeutic delivery vehicles for spinal cord injury. 
• Claire Mc Cormack: From the pen to the public domain: a critical analysis of mainstream media coverage of agriculture and food; the factors that influence editorial decisions on farm and food production news, and audience impact
• Claudia Vlad: Cultural Heritage, civil resistance and transnational governmentality in East Jerusalem and the West Bank (from the Oslo Accords to today)
• Clodagh Cogley: End-stage kidney disease and mental health: Bridging the gap.
• Conor O'Donnell: Making the Invisible Visible: A new disruptive real time imaging platform at the nanoscale for the life sciences
• Eimear Harrison: Activation of CO2 on Polyaza Macrocycles
• Emilia Filipczak: Interpreting human genetic variation in cilia disease using the C. elegans animal model.
• Grace Pender: Exploring Plant Architecture in Cannabis sativa.
• Isaac Bennett: Changing the Calculus of War: How casualties affect the use of new military technologies in liberal democracies. 
• Jack Eoin Rua O'Neill: Improving understanding of low energy availability (LEA) in elite student athletes: developing an optimal monitoring strategy
• Jamie McLoughlin: The Right to Life as a Source of Positive State Human Rights Duties: A Comparative Analysis of the Irish Constitution and International Human Rights Law
• John Byrne: PhD Title - Detecting prey from predator scat.
• Jonathan Devlin: Development of a Continuous Photochemical Benzyne Forming Process and its Application towards the Synthesis of Bioactive Target Molecules
• Julia Cañas Martínez: (DFA (Andrew Grene Scholarship)) Who are the Western Women of the Islamic State? Exploring the Lives and Motivations of Women in Conflict 
• Katie Whelan: Scéal na mBan' in iriseoireacht na Gaeilge i dtréimhse iar-athbheochana na hÉireann, 1922-1962
• Kelly Louise Rexzy Agra: Philosophy, the Philosophical Institution, and Epistemic Paralysis 
• Kevin Cunningham: Gravitational Waveform Models for Intermediate and Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals 
• Leah Ennis McLoughlin: Developing a novel antiviral strategy against SARS-CoV-2 by specifically targeting the host-virus interface 
• Liam Jowett: Magnetic nanoparticles as local heat seeds for controlled release applications in chemotherapy and tissue engineering
• Loic Wright: The Life That Men Should Live: Masculinities in Mid-Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction and Culture, 1931-1965
• Lucie Martin: Who bears administrative burden, and how does it affect inequality? Behavioural economics and the social distribution of paperwork.
• Mairead Barrett: Power, Politics and Peace of mind: The study of how German financial integration into the global economy before 1914 shaped debates about German national security
• Marcella Chalella Mazzocato: Obtaining technological and process improvements in beverage production through food-grade immobilisation system of enzymes
• Maria Agnese Casellato: Linguistic Reference: Descriptivism, Externalism and a Middle Course 
• Maryanne Brassil: Misleading memories: The role of general memory ability in protecting eyewitness recollections from distortion 
• Mathieu Bokestael: Towards a Caring Communitas: Performing Immunitas and Care in Contemporary Scottish Fictions 
• Michele Gubello: Intergenerational transmission of unemployment: Does timing matter? 
• Niall Costello: The impact of engagement with education and working on cognitive brain health across the life course 
• Niamh Duggan: BREATHE: BacteRial mEchanisms controlling the switch from Acute To cHronic infEction 
• Olivia Breen: Now with added Iron! Incorporating Iron into Recycled Lithium Battery Cathodes to Conserve Critical Raw Materials
• Peter McCarthy: Defining the molecular landscape of paediatric and adolescent acute leukaemia in Tanzania 
• Philip Carthy: Environment, Health, and Economic Well-being: A Long-Term Perspective
• Rachel Claire Brady: Intellectual Property versus Morality: Analysing the Role of Morality in the Regulation of Patent and Trade Mark Registrations
• Rebecca Lynch: Development of Catalytic Asymmetric Grignard Synthesis of Tertiary Alcohols
• Rosanne Gallenne: The Trope of the Garden in Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Space of (Re)Definition.
• Roxane Pret Théodore: Rethinking political organization from a feminist standpoint: Politicizing an ethics of care and vulnerability.
• Teerna Banerjee: Functional analysis of endocytic Rab proteins in a 3D cellular context
• Thinley Chodon: Worlding Contemporary Anglophone Writings of the Global Tibetan Diaspora and Exiles: Exploring Resistance, Religiosity and 'Tibetanness' 
• Vanessa Becker: Novel methodologies for nitrogen heterocycle synthesis and functionalisation via pyridylsulfonium salts
• Yue Wang: SAMHAIN: Suppressing Artefacts in MRI and Holography using AI Networks

Postdoctoral Fellowships 

• Anup Kumar Talukder: Decoding maternal-embryonic communication during pregnancy establishment in cattle
• Conor Meleady: British rule in Muslim holy cities, 1914 - 1948
• Daniel Malanski: Memories of Modernity – Class, Ethnic, Gendered and Environmental discourses on Olympic ceremonies at the turn of the century
• Danny Hnatyshin: Rhenium-Osmium (Re-Os) Geochronology of Natural Resources Critical for Sustainable Resource Development in Ireland and Europe
• Dinesh Kumar Reddy Medipally: Development of methods based on vibrational spectroscopy of minimally invasive biofluids for identification of clinically significant prostate cancer
• Enrique José Estévez Campo: A Novel Multianalytic Investigation of External Morphology and Internal Architecture in Human Juvenile Female and Male Ilium and Femur Using 3D Geometric-Morphometrics and Histo-Morphometrics Analyses
• Graham Clay: Hume on the Power of Philosophy
• Laëtitia Saint-Loubert: Rethinking Translation Studies from Caribbean meridians: towards an ecosystemic approach
• Mara Josi: Rome, 16 October 1943. History, Memory, Literature
• Marco Timpanella: Algebraic curves over finite fields and Their applications to Coding Theory and Cryptography
• Maria Mulvany: Ghostly Fictions: Haunting, Trauma and Time in Contemporary Irish Historical Fiction 
• Matthew Thomson: Courtly Song and Bodily Desire in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century France 
• Patrick Nickleson: X-Marks: First Nations and Settler Epistemologies of Graphic Scores
• Rory Connolly: NeoMarE - Neolithic Marine resource exploitation in Atlantic Europe
• Ryan Lash: Carved in Stone: Materialities of Craft and Devotion at Ireland's Atlantic Monasteries
• Sadhanendu Samanta: Asymmetric Synthesis of “ResoLvipoxins” - New Hybrid Lipoxin A4 Resolvin Analogues
• Sara Delmedico: ‘Bad Luck’ and ‘Irresistible Force’: Framing Violence against Women in Italy (1861-1930)
• Sean O'Brien: World-System Failure: Secular Stagnation and Post-2008 American Culture
• Serena Laiena: Actresses in Commedia dell’Arte (1560–1680): A Social Revolution
• Sonja Kacar (Defougere): The last Hunter-fisher-gatherers of the South-Eastern Europe. Networks, Innovations and Migrations between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean during the 8th and 7th millennium BC 

Commenting on the new investment, Minster for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD said: “I am particularly pleased to see the record number of awards being made this year under the two programmes combined.

“The programmes are unique in the Irish research landscape, supporting excellent individual postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers to develop innovative and creative ideas across the sciences, humanities and the arts. I would like to congratulate all the awardees on their success in the schemes and wish them well in their research endeavours.

Adding: “Now more than ever, the benefits of investing in research and innovation are clear, and this starts with fuelling the pipeline of excellent early-career researchers. Support for basic research and investment in cutting-edge expertise across different disciplines is vital for Ireland, and this will be key to ensuring that we can overcome national and global challenges now and in the future.”

This year, an additional €7.5m in funding was made available to help the Irish Research Council to enhance the number of postgraduate awards in the emerging technological university sector – leading to an extra 40 additional awards being made under the Postgraduate Scholarship Programme. 

UCD Vice-President for Research, Innovation and Impact, (opens in a new window)Professor Orla Feely said: “We are delighted to see so many of these prestigious awards granted to UCD applicants in both the postgraduate and postdoctoral schemes.

“The IRC Government of Ireland awards are of great value in driving further development of the Irish research landscape, not only in promoting excellence and outstanding scholarship but also in developing creativity and innovation at the early career stage.

“Our awardees have succeeded with exceptional and unique proposals addressing key emerging fields of research, and we wish them further success as they embark on these exciting opportunities.”

By: David Kearns, Digital Journalist / Media Officer, UCD University Relations (with materials from Caroline Byrne, UCD Research and Innovation)