A joint investment of approx. €21 million was today announced through a tripartite research and development (R&D) partnership between the USA, Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, marking the highest number of annual awards ever made through the programme, which came about as a result of the Good Friday Agreement.
Under the Programme, which celebrates its 17th year in operation, 12 awards have been announced spanning 27 research institutions and supporting more than 35 research positions in the Republic of Ireland, and over 25 research positions in Northern Ireland, for three to five years.
The funded projects include research in the areas of energy storage and conversion, wearable health diagnostics, 5G/6G communications and quantum networks. Three UCD-led projects have received awards, and UCD is collaborating on a fourth project. The Programme is supported by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Health Research Board (HRB) in the Republic of Ireland; the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA; and the Department for the Economy (DfE) and the Health & Social Care R&D Division in Northern Ireland.
Professor Philip Nolan, Director General of Science Foundation Ireland welcomed the announcement, saying: “The growth of the US-Ireland R&D Partnership Programme since its inception, highlights the significant value of our international collaborations. I am particularly pleased to see the evolution of a number of the groups that have now won multiple US-Ireland awards. I am delighted to congratulate the award recipients and their collaborators on their work which spans both fundamental and applied research and has the potential to greatly benefit our collective societies and economies.”
NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said: "The U.S.-Ireland R&D Partnership program plays an important role in pushing the boundaries of frontier research beyond any borders. This unique research partnership model aims to generate, at speed and scale, valuable discoveries and innovations which are transferable to the marketplace or will lead to enhancements in health, climate resilience and telecommunications to improve our world. I congratulate the awardees and look forward to seeing how their outcomes contribute to successfully addressing global challenges."
Mark Lee, Interim Director of Higher Education at Northern Ireland’s Department for the Economy, said: “International research partnerships have a key role to play in driving forward Northern Ireland’s vision for a ‘10x Economy’ to deliver economic prosperity and a better quality of life for all our people. The US-Ireland R&D Partnership, as a flagship trans-Atlantic initiative, is playing a crucial role in the delivery of this vision, supporting Northern Ireland-based researchers to make a global impact through the development of new and ground-breaking technologies that can benefit all right across society.”
UCD Academics awarded under the Programme
This is the third US-Ireland award for the research group led by Professor Catherine Godson, UCD School of Medicine, UCD Diabetes Complications Research Centre, UCD Conway Institute. They have been collaborating with Professor Peter Maxwell’s group in Queen’s University Belfast and were the recipients of the first US-Ireland award ever made in 2008.
Kidney disease is a common and devastating complication of diabetes, and represents a major public health problem worldwide. For this project entitled A functional genomics pipeline for genetic discovery in diabetic kidney disease, Professor Godson and Dr Eoin Brennan UCD School of Medicine, UCD Diabetes Complications Research Centre, UCD Conway Institute will collaborate with Professor Maxwell, Professor Amy Jayne McKnight and Dr Gareth McKay, QUB, Professor Jose Florez and Professor Joel Hirschhorn, Harvard Medical School, and Mass General Hospital, to expand their approach to type 2 diabetes, increasing sample size seven-fold to augment the opportunities for genetic discovery. In addition, by combining and integrating data from several complementary approaches, they hope to identify genes and biological processes that impact the development of diabetic kidney disease, and may help guide the development of improved treatments and preventive measures. This work is co-funded by the Health Research Board (HRB) and Health and Social Care (HSC) Research and Development, Northern Ireland.
HRB Chief Executive, Dr Mairéad O'Driscoll said: “We are delighted to support Professor Godson’s work in kidney disease which represents a major public health problem worldwide. The HRB is committed to supporting highly innovative international collaboration through the US-Ireland R&D Programme to generate health benefits in Ireland and internationally.” Also welcoming the announcement, Dr Janice Bailie, Assistant Director, HSC Research and Development, Northern Ireland, said: “US-Ireland research collaboration continues to demonstrate its immense value. We look forward to seeing the results of Professor Godson’s and Professor Maxwell’s work, which has potential to improve kidney disease treatments and preventive measures.”
Professor Brian Rodriguez’s group UCD School of Physics, UCD Conway Institute, has received a second US-Ireland Programme award, for the project entitled Processing-Driven Nucleation Mediated Control for Manufacturing of Phase-Pure Ferroelectric Hafnia, which could lead to the development of computing with low power requirements. In collaboration with Dr Amit Kumar, Queen’s University Belfast, Dr Christina Rost, James Madison University and Dr Jon Ihlefeld, University of Virginia, he aims to develop new knowledge related to the manufacturing of electronic materials that will not form naturally, but that exhibit useful properties.
The material of study in this effort is hafnium oxide with a specific arrangement of atoms that results in a spontaneous electric charge separation that can be changed with application of a sufficient voltage. This functionality is useful for future generations of low power computing and computer memory. Funded by the National Science Foundation (USA), Science Foundation Ireland (Republic of Ireland) and the Department for the Economy (Northern Ireland), it is hoped that this research will enable the development and manufacturing of new microelectronic technologies that could lead to new functionality and less energy consumption.
Professor Niall English, UCD School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering, is partnering with the University of Ulster, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Texas at Austin on the Full Atomistic Understanding of Solid-Liquid Interfaces via an Integrated Experiment-Theory Approach.
This project aims to achieve a thorough understanding of surfaces of electrodes in contact with electrically active liquids. It is probing, at the atomic level, how liquids are structured at these interfaces, using state-of-the-art experiments and computer simulations. These experiments and simulations provide advanced imaging of the surfaces at an atomic level, and on how this affects the electrostatic "personality" of the surface. Collaborators on the project are Dr Amir Faroukh Payam, University of Ulster, Professor Yingje Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Professor Narayana Aluru, University of Texas at Austin.
On the Trinity College Dublin-led project entitled Convergent Quantum REsearchAlliance in Telecommunications (CoQREATE), Professor Mark Flanagan, UCD School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering will collaborate with PI Professor Daniel Kilper and researchers from QUB, Dublin City University, Tyndall National Institute, South East Technological University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of Chicago.
With the rapid development of quantum computers, there is a pressing need to develop a quantum Internet, providing true quantum connectivity between quantum computers over short and long distances. The NSF Engineering Research Centre for Quantum Networks, SFI Centres for Future Networks and Communications (CONNECT) and Irish Photonic Integration Centre together with the Quantum Technology Group at QUB, have formed a Centre-to-Centre partnership to address key questions of how to realise telecommunication systems that support the coexistence of quantum and classical signals, the architecture of classical control systems to manage quantum networks, and applications that exploit the combined power of quantum and classical networks. Considering both fibre and satellite-based telecommunications, the research objectives of this project are organised around network technologies, network applications, and socio-technical convergence.
There are 27 collaborating institutions across the island of Ireland and the USA. For more information on the programme and full list of awards, visit https://www.sfi.ie/funding/funding-calls/us-ireland-rd-partnership/.