Five DCU researchers progress to next stage of Research Ireland National Challenge Fund
The latest funding comes as part of an announcement of a total of €5 million for ten teams announced by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science James Lawless today.
The ten remaining teams now have the chance to compete for an additional €2 million awarded to one team in each of the two categories in today’s announcement. Over the next twelve months each team will advance prototypes and demonstrate the tangible impact of their projects.
The National Challenge Fund, a programme funded by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, has supported 96 teams to identify problems related to Ireland’s Green Transition and Digital Transformation and collaborate directly with those stakeholders most affected by them to create real and tangible solutions.
The funded teams from Dublin City University include the Prof Susan Kelleher and Dr Jennifer Gaughran’s Puretex project, Prof David O'Connor and Prof Anne Parle McDermot’s AgSENSE project, and the NanoSA project featuring Prof Enda McGlynn.
Prof Kelleher and Dr Gaughran’s project, featuring in the Sustainable communities challenge, evolved from a simple question: could old clothes be converted into household insulation? Having just insulated her own home, Prof Kelleher knew that polymers in clothing textiles weren’t fundamentally all that different from those used in insulation.
The project has involved taking end of life textiles, which have been used and discarded and would normally be incinerated or put into landfill here or overseas, and synthesising them into insulation which is tested to industry standards.
The research team also features Dr Emma Delemere from the School of Psychology, and Dr Aimee Byrne from Technological University Dublin. The societal impact champion for the project is Claire Downey, based at the Rediscovery Centre in Ballymun, who has experience in textile recycling.
Prof Susan Kelleher said:
"Given the enormous scale of the textile problem, the PUreTex team is delighted to be further supported by Research Ireland to not only develop energy-efficient means of recycling end-of-life textiles into more useful materials, but to continue our work with The Rediscovery Centre in engaging with the textile industry to improve production and management strategies in the first place."
Dr David O’Connor and Dr Anne Parle McDermott are collaborating on another project in the Future Foods Systems Challenge. The project involves developing a new tool to forecast airborne fungi and bacteria, and reducing crop losses by 20%, through more efficient spraying.
Ireland has long had an issue with fungal spores, going back at least as far as the Great Famine, when fungal spores attacked the potato crop.
The project will look at two different ways of ‘sensing’ the presence of fungal spores or bacteria in the environment.
Also in the Future Foods Systems challenge, Professor Enda McGlynn also received funding for the next stage on a project led by the Atlantic Technological University. This project involves the development of nanostructures that will enable a new device to act as a point-of-care diagnostic test for diseases in fisheries and aquaculture.
The identification of pathogens on site will be a significant improvement over lab-based tests, as it will make the early diagnosis of disease now possible. It is hoped that such early diagnosis will lead to lower losses of fish stocks, and more sustainable fisheries. Prof McGlynn is developing tests similar to the lateral flow tests used during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Prof Enda McGlynn said:
“DCU's School of Physical Sciences is delighted to partner with ATU as part of the Research Ireland Future Food Systems Challenge to work on transformative point of care diagnostic devices for the aquaculture industry which will reduce the waiting times for disease identification to less than 60 minutes at the farm site, compared to a week or more at present for samples sent for laboratory analysis. DCU's School of Physical Sciences has a well established reputation in the area of nanostructure synthesis, and these innovative nanomaterials are an integral part of the point of care diagnostic devices under development.”