The Irish Research Council has announced €27 million in funding for new research projects under the Irish Research Council’s flagship Government of Ireland programmes. The investment will fund 316 awards in total, namely 239 postgraduate scholarships and 77 postdoctoral fellowships.

Under the scheme, the awardees will conduct research on a multitude of topics, ranging from a future Irish arts policy, machine translation and social media, protecting wild bee populations and bioplastics.

Welcoming the announcement, Louise Callinan, Director of the Irish Research Council, said: “The prestigious Government of Ireland awards recognise and fund pioneering research projects, along with addressing new and emerging fields of research that introduce creative and innovative approaches across all disciplines, including the sciences, humanities and the arts. Funding schemes like the IRC’s Government of Ireland programmes are vitally important to the wider research landscape in Ireland, as they ensure that researchers are supported at an early stage of their career and are given an opportunity to direct their own research.”

 

Successful Awardees

Some of the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme awardees at UCD include:

 

• Benjamin Swift, Constitutional Legitimacy in the European Union: The ECB and the Council in Times of Crisis
• Caoimhe Doyle, Rethinking agricultural intensification and its links to zoonotic disease and farmland biodiversity: a One Health approach
• Clara Stein: The impact of cognitive reserve on cognitive functioning in people with multiple sclerosis
• Conor Foy: Going beyond the visible: Machine learning methods to improve optical nanoscale imaging beyond the diffraction limit 

 

Some of the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme awardees at UCD include:

 

• Amiya Pandit, A novel combination of Tuned Mass Dampers and sloped wall Tuned Liquid Dampers for vibration control of offshore wind turbines (Damp-Wind)
• Benedetta Luciana Sara Carnaghi, Making Fun of the Fascists: Humour Against the Leader Cult in Italy, France, and Germany, 1922–1945
• Claudia Dellacasa, Intersectional Eco-Polyphony: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Dialogues in Contemporary Women's Writing (1960s-2020s)
• Dario Manzanares Sandoval, Gene therapy for Recessive Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa: a new perspective with multiple exon excision
• Ester Canepa, NanoEXOS: Towards a Novel Mechanistic Understanding of Nanoparticle Interactions with Exosome Secretion

 

To see the full list of awardees, including 70 recipients from UCD, visit the Irish Research Council website.  

 

To deliver on shared national objectives, each year the Government of Ireland programmes collaborate with strategic funding partners. 11 of this year’s awards were made in collaboration with and funded by partner agencies. The agencies include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and the Department of Foreign Affairs.

 

Early Career Researcher Event

The new postgraduate awardees will be honoured at a special event for early career researchers being hosted by the Irish Research Council in Dublin on 30 September. At the event, chaired by Dr Shane Bergin from UCD School of Education, the researchers will receive expert advice about career pathways and ways of communicating their research from leaders in these fields in the form of two panel discussions. The panel on career pathways will feature Anne-Julie Lafaye from the National Monuments Service and Dr Julie LeMoine from HorizonIRs. The communications for researchers panel will feature Dr Maeve O'Rourke from the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the University of Galway, Dr Dónal Mulligan from DCU’s School of Communications and Dr Cara Augustenborg, Assistant Professor in Landscape Studies and Environmental Policy at UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy.

 

Image: Irish Research Council, Brakemi Egbedi, WIT