Consolidator Awards: ERC awards €10m to ‘pioneering’ UCD researchers
Posted 3 December, 2024
Associate Professor Aisling Ní Annaidh, pictured at UCD School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering
Five researchers from University College Dublin have received prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Awards - the highest number awarded to an Irish university in one call.
The UCD awardees will each receive €2 million for their projects spanning Law, Philosophy, Biomechanical Engineering and Information and Communication Studies.
Some 328 researchers across Europe received a total of €678m in ERC Consolidator Grants - under the EU’s Horizon Europe programme - this year. Of the six awarded to Ireland, only one did not go to a recipient based at UCD.
Recognising outstanding scientists and scholars, the grants aim to support those at a career stage where they may still be consolidating their own independent research teams to pursue their most promising scientific ideas.
The UCD recipients are Professor (opens in a new window)Cathryn Costello, Associate Professors (opens in a new window)Ruth Boeker and (opens in a new window)Aisling Ní Annaidh, and Dr (opens in a new window)Maebh Harding and Dr (opens in a new window)Lai Ma.
RefLex: Is International Refugee Law Effective?
PI: Professor Cathryn Costello, UCD Sutherland School of Law
RefLex entails a global comparative study of the workings and effectiveness of International Refugee Law (IRL), a body of international law that is implemented, domesticated and judicialised to varying degrees across the world.
While there are many studies on the effectiveness of International Human Rights Law and the impact of human rights courts and other bodies, there are no large-n mixed methods comparative studies of International Refugee Law (IRL) in practice. RefLex will fill this huge knowledge gap, developing a new dataset - the Refugee Protection Index - to explore under what conditions IRL is effective in delivering protection for refugees.
“RefLex aims to provide vital insights at a time when the global refugee regime is increasingly adrift from International Law," said Professor Cathryn Costello. "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with two scholars I admire immensely – Professors Lamis Abdelaaty (Syracuse University, USA) and Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen’s University, Canada) – and to build a new research team to work at the cutting edge of research on international law and politics.”
BMoral: New Histories of British Moral Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (c.1690–1800)
PI: Associate Professor Ruth Boeker, UCD School of Philosophy
The project will offer unprecedented opportunities to assess the extent of women’s distinct contributions to British moral philosophy and to recover neglected themes in 18th-century moral writings.
"We have overwhelming evidence that women actively participated in moral debates during that period," said Associate Professor Ruth Boeker. "Many were concerned with philosophical and moral questions that play a role in everyday life such as education, mastery of emotions, love, or friendship. Their views have not yet received sufficient attention in existing studies on British moral philosophy."
She added, “BMoral intends to change this by bringing together computational and traditional philosophical methods. This innovative approach makes it possible to analyse a large corpus of 18th-century writings and to examine the social and intellectual networks in which male and female philosophers interacted, with the potential not only to change the focus of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy, but also to transform the history of philosophy more broadly."
BreastRecon: A patient specific approach to tissue expansion in breast Reconstruction
PI: Associate Professor Aisling Ní Annaidh, UCD School of Mechanical & Materials Engineering
For women who undergo a mastectomy, breast reconstruction has become an integral part of their treatment. However, the most common procedure - two stage implant-based reconstruction - is associated with high complication rates and low patient satisfaction.
These reconstructions involve the insertion of a tissue expander and silicone implants which are gradually inflated below the skin over several weeks to induce new skin growth. The inability to evaluate and predict this tissue growth is an obstacle to effective surgical planning.
"The project will initially develop a tool to monitor tissue growth in vivo, offering valuable fundamental insights into growth and remodelling processes," said Associate Professor Aisling Ní Annaidh.
"Using this new methodology, BreastRecon will ultimately advance patient-specific tissue expansions by designing optimum surgical protocols, offering a disruptive breakthrough in reconstructive surgeries."
REDEFPARENT: Redefining Legal Parenthood as a Legal Interdependency between Parent and Child
PI: Dr Maebh Harding, UCD Sutherland School of Law
REDEFPARENT aims to provide a new way to think about the legal nexus between parent and child, that of a two-way legal interdependency. This new legal conceptualisation will reflect the interests of both parents and children and recognise that obligations and vulnerabilities fluctuate over the life course.
Reassessing the very basis of family law, the project will interrogate the historical, legal and social dimensions of legal parenthood in Ireland, England and Wales, Sweden and Poland to expose the gaps between the regulatory work that the concept of legal parenthood is currently doing and the social expectations that are placed on the concept.
“This new way of thinking will be groundbreaking to how we understand the obligations and vulnerabilities of family life," said Dr Maebh Harding.
"REDEFPARENT is a hugely significant and timely project that allows us to properly assess the real-life effect of legal regulation on family function and personal identity and frame new, more inclusive regulatory models.”
SCRiBe: Sustainable and Collaborative Research Information for Bibliodiverse Ecosystems: A Transnational Study
PI: Dr Lai Ma, UCD School of Information and Communication Studies
Open Research refers to the various movements and practices that aim to make scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone.
SCRiBe will critically examine the conceptualisation of ‘open’ in the open access movement, as well as boundaries, limitations, and exceptions in the development of open research infrastructure since the late 1990s.
It aims to identify the constraints that hinder the growth of bibliodiversity in three different geographical regions: Europe, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
“This project will shed light on an overlooked research area in knowledge production, providing new perspectives to improve understanding of the global inequities of knowledge production," said Dr Lai Ma.
"By investigating the relationship between standards, geopolitics and transnational knowledge flows, we will identify the boundaries and regulations that create obstacles to bibliodiversity. SCRiBe will expand the horizon of the study of global knowledge production, towards developing more sustainable, collaborative, and equitable research ecosystems.”
“Congratulations to the five UCD academics who have been recognised as pioneers in their fields through these awards,” said Professor Kate Robson Brown, UCD Vice-President for Research, Innovation and Impact. “Their success in this highly competitive call reflects the breadth of expertise across disciplines at UCD and the quality of world-class research being carried out here."
President of the European Research Council Professor Maria Leptin added: “Whilst we had the funds available to back more applicants this year than in 2023, the fact remains that many applicants who were rated as excellent in this competition will still not be funded due to lack of budget. This waste of talent can only be tackled by increasing the investment in blue-sky research in Europe.”
Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, said Europe could only remain a global leader in research and innovation “by retaining and attracting top talent such as today’s laureates of ERC Consolidator Grants”. “It is my mission to expand the ERC which will help strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and foster ground-breaking discoveries and solutions to the challenges we face.”
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
