Irish Research Council announces €27m in Irish Research Council funding to support the next generation of top researchers
Posted: 30 September, 2022
The Irish Research Council has today (30.09.22) announced €27m 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 include:
- Cherrelle Johnson from University of Galway working on the long-term sustainability of bioplastics as an alternative to fossil fuel based
- Massimiliano Zanotto from Technological University of the Shannon for the project ‘Understanding Incubators and Accelerators: Analysis of Their Social and Economic Impact on Innovation and Entrepreneurship’.
- Tammy Strickland from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences will look into the role of the circadian rhythm (sleep-wake cycle) of immune cells in the brain in epilepsy
- Sophie Thiesen from Maynooth University for the project exploring how art and poetry work through the difficulties of the past and of coming-of-age from a feminist adolescent perspective.
Some of the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme awardees include:
- Steven Hadley from Trinity College Dublin examines the relationship between our understanding of what ‘culture’ and ‘arts’ are, and who gets to make those decisions, in the context of Irish arts policy.
- Khetam Al Sharou from Dublin City University is looking into the use of machine translation in social media and the associated risks of information distortion.
- Robert Brose from Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies investigates the particles and radiation that are emitted by high-energy sources in our milky way, to try and find the most likely sources of life.
- Deirdre Foley from University College Cork is looking at the working lives of women in Ireland between 1965-1990.
- Diana Carolina Pimentel Betancurt from Teagasc is looking for natural probiotics in native honeybees in order to mitigate the effect of pesticides.
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 University College Dublin, 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 University College Dublin.
