An investment of almost €24 million in ‘curiosity-driven’ frontier research has been announced by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris, TD. The investment will fund 48 ground-breaking research projects under the Irish Research Council’s Starting and Consolidator Laureate Awards Programme.

Under the scheme, researchers will receive funding for cutting-edge projects equally divided across the fields of the humanities; physical sciences and engineering; life sciences; and social sciences. Their research areas range from new approaches to treatment for diseases such as cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, 6G technology development, interculturalism in rural Ireland, changing storm patterns and the communication of climate science.

The Laureate programme encompasses two streams of funding, namely ‘starting’ funding for early-career researchers who are to receive €400,000 each and ‘consolidator’ funding for mid-career researchers who are to receive €600,000 each. 

Two Ukrainian researchers will collaborate on two of the newly awarded projects in UCD as part of the IRC’s Ukrainian Researcher Scheme (now closed). The scheme was established so that researchers from Ukraine who are arriving in Ireland due to the war could be supported by the Irish research system. 

Announcing the awards, Minister Harris said: "I am delighted to announce the winners of the second round of the Irish Research Council’s Starting and Consolidator Laureate Awards Programme and I congratulate each of the awardees. It is a pleasure to also welcome the Ukrainian researcher who came to Ireland from the war in Ukraine, and who will collaborate on one of the newly funded projects through the IRC’s innovative Ukrainian Researchers Scheme. These talented researchers will no doubt contribute hugely towards the world-class excellence that is the bedrock of our research system in Ireland, pushing the boundaries of research knowledge and finding new discoveries that deepen our understanding of the world around us, by looking to the past, questioning the present, and unlocking our future potential."

Vice-President for Research, Innovation and Impact, Professor Orla Feely: "I am pleased to congratulate all of this year's IRC Laureate awardees on achieving funding under this competitive scheme. I echo the minister's welcome to our new Ukrainian researcher who joins Dr Adam Kelly in UCD School of English, Drama and Film. The IRC Laureate programme is an essential part of the research funding landscape, enabling excellent researchers to conduct frontier basic research across all disciplines.

Dr Louise Callinan, Director of the Irish Research Council, said: "The 48 researchers who will receive funding under the Starting and Consolidator Laureate Awards Programme have the potential to make ground-breaking advances in their respective fields and to bolster Ireland’s competitiveness in European research funding. This is the second round of Laureate funding and many of the first-round awardees will be completing their research next year. It is testament to the success of the programme that three of the first-round awardees have already gone on to receive European Research Council funding, one as part of Ireland’s first ERC Synergy grant worth €10 million. The winning projects were awarded on the basis solely of excellence, and applications were assessed through a rigorous and independent international peer-review process."

 

Successful UCD Projects

Dr Adam Kelly, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, partnered with Dr Iryna Kovalchuk, National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv. Consolidator Award: TRUST - Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025

Dr Elaine O’Reilly, UCD School of Chemistry. Consolidator Award: BindCat - Turning Binding Proteins into Catalysts for Late-Stage Functionalisation of Natural Products

Dr Fangzhe Qiu, UCD School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore. Starting Award: INTEREST - Intellectual networks and text reuse in late medie-val Irish law tracts 

Dr Laura Taylor, UCD School of Psychology. Starting Award: GENERATION PEACE - A Multilevel, Global Ex-amination of the Predictors and Impact of Youth Peacebuilding

Dr Rainer Melzer, UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science. Consolidator Award: The XY-files - Unravelling the sex determination system in Cannabis sativa

Dr Ronald Halim, UCD School of Biosystems and Food Engineering, partnered with Dr Svitlana Miros, Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University. Starting Award: MICRO-LYSIS - Cell-Wall Autolysis for the Scalable Fractionation of Microalgae into Biofuels and Novel Food Prod-ucts

Dr Rory Johnson, UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science. Consolidator Award: PE-Fit - Detecting “Dark Matter” in the Cancer Genome: Mapping Fitness-Altering Noncoding Tumour Mu-tations with CRISPR Prime Editing

Dr Sarah Comyn, UCD School of English, Drama and Film. Starting Award: MINERALS - Imperial Minerals: Reading Mineral Extraction in the Anglophone Literary Cultures of the British Southern Settler Colonies, 1842-1910

Dr Stephanie Dornschneider-Elkink, UCD School of Politics and International Relations.Consolidator Award: WARRIOR - Women And Radical Religion In Organized Re-sistance. The Case of Hezbollah 

Assoc Professor Taha Yasseri, UCD School of Sociology. Consolidator Award: ANNETTE - Artificial Intelligence Enhanced Collective Intelligence

 

Further information about the Laureate Awards is available at www.research.ie.

 

About the IRC Laureate Awards

The Irish Research Council Laureate Awards were launched in 2017 and aim to drive forward Ireland’s reputation and performance for ground-breaking research. Prior to that, Ireland had fallen behind international peer countries in relation to the level of investment in research designed to drive new discoveries and bring new understandings to the world around us. The Laureate awards are designed to ensure that Ireland has a rich and varied research ecosystem. The awards support Ireland-based researchers of any discipline to become world-leading in their field, in doing so enhancing Ireland’s reputation for cutting-edge knowledge and innovation. The awards are also designed to enhance the success of Ireland-based researchers in competing for prestigious grants from the European Research Council.