IRC names pioneering UCD projects among frontier research benefitting from €16m investment
Posted 13 December 2023
Three UCD researchers will each receive up to €1 million under the (opens in a new window)Irish Research Council’s (IRC) Advanced Laureate Awards programme.
The trio are among sixteen awardees for 2023 that will share in €16m in funding over a period of up to four years.
The IRC’s Advanced Laureate Awards (ALAs) support established research leaders with a record of original and significant research contributions to further push the frontiers of knowledge in their respective fields.
The UCD awardees are:
- (opens in a new window)Dr Kazim Buyukboduk, UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics
- (opens in a new window)Dr Robert Osburn, UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics
- (opens in a new window)Professor Ken Wolfe, UCD School of Medicine and a UCD Conway Institute Fellow
The ALAs aim to enhance frontier research in Irish research-performing organisations across all disciplines and build the international competitiveness of senior researchers.
The awards are designed to encourage and widen the gateway to future European Research Council (ERC) funding, one of the most prestigious grant schemes in Europe, whilst boosting Ireland’s ability to retain excellent researchers in our research system.
This year the sixteen researchers to receive funding were across a range of disciplines including life sciences, the humanities, physical sciences and engineering, and the social sciences.
"I am delighted to congratulate this year's successful IRC Advanced Laureate awardees from UCD as they embark on the exploration of new horizons in research areas of cybersecurity, quantum theory and genomic evolution,” said UCD Interim Vice-President for Research, Innovation and Impact, (opens in a new window)Professor Helen Roche.
“The IRC Advanced Laureate awards are an essential part of Ireland’s research landscape, enabling our leaders to conduct important frontier research and build international competitiveness.”
Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD added that ALA help push the boundaries of knowledge and research forward, breaking new ground and enhancing Ireland’s leadership internationally in solving key challenges.
“Ireland is a small island on the edge of Europe and has maintained a reputation for excellent research and strong interconnectedness with the best of the global research community,” he said.
“This is the case across the sciences, arts, and humanities and it is crucial we continue to foster a vibrant research eco-system and grasp the full potential of research for society, innovation, the economy, and our culture.
“The IRC’s support for basic research across all disciplines and career stages is a key pillar in this regard and government is committed to maintaining and building on this support with the establishment of a unified research agency in 2024 in the form of Research Ireland.”
The 2023 IRC Advanced Laureate Awardees from UCD:
Dr Kazim Buyukboduk, Project: Arithmetic of critical p-adic L-functions — Higher dimensional eigenvarieties
Dr Buyokboduk will study variational properties of arithmetic objects, which has become a major theme of the number theory domain of mathematics, namely automorphic forms. This research will pave the way for new theoretical techniques to tackle mathematical problems of central importance, while also laying the foundation for future progress in applied areas, such as in algorithms to encrypt data for transmission and public-key cryptography, which is the backbone of cybersecurity.
Dr Robert Osburn, Project: Q-series, quantum knot invariants and modularity
Dr Osburn will lead pioneering research that will involve new analytic, algebraic combinatorial and knot-theoretic techniques. This project will constitute completely uncharted territory, with potential transformative impacts in the study of automorphic forms, quantum topology, combinatorics, theoretical physics and beyond.
Professor Ken Wolfe, Project: Meiotic drive and evolution of pericentromeric genome organisation in budding yeasts
Prof Wolfe will undertake research based on his recent discovery that challenges the general thinking that the locations of genes along chromosomes in eukaryotes is random. This project will use experiments to test a proposed model in which the regions of chromosomes located close to centromeres (pericentromeric regions) are under strong selection to contain genes that are required during the early stages of spore development, and possibly also the early stages of bud formation.
By: David Kearns, Digital Journalist / Media Officer, UCD University Relations (with materials from Emma Loughney, UCD Research and Innovation)
To contact the UCD News & Content Team, email: newsdesk@ucd.ie
