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Research Newsletter - Issue 58: Good News

SFI Frontiers for the Future 2019 Awards and Projects

Congratulations to the DCU researchers who were awarded the SFI Frontiers for the Future grants to conduct innovative high-risk, high-reward projects with the potential to facilitate novel approaches to research and deliver economic and societal impacts:

  • Prof. Tia Keyes (School of Chemical Sciences) for the Frontiers Award project “Shedding light on advanced microscopy; Supramolecular probes for super-resolution microscopy and phototheranostics”. The project will develop probes that highlight specific stretches of DNA inside living cells, which will have applications in assessing cell damage during screening of new drug candidates. The DCU team will also include Prof. Conor Long (School of Chemical Sciences) and Dr Naomi Walsh (School of Biotechnology and NICB). 
  • Dr Mary Pryce (School of Chemical Sciences) for the Frontiers Award project “Exploiting Singlet Fission: An Innovate Design Strategy For Antimicrobial Materials”. The project will develop and test a new class of medicines into antimicrobial materials and solutions for medical use to treat serious antibiotic-resistant infections. The DCU team will also include Prof Stephen Daniels (School of Electronic Engineering) and the project will be co-led with Dr Deirdre Fitzgerald-Hughes in RCSI. 
  • Dr Paula Meleady (NICB) for the Frontiers Award project “Deciphering the role of ubiquitination in regulating the productivity of biotherapeutics from recombinant Chinese hamster ovary cell lines”. The project will study therapeutic protein production at the proteomic level using state of the art experimental methods and the outputs of this project will help understand the cellular demands of producing therapeutic proteins and ultimately will enable to produce this class of drugs more efficiently.
  • Prof. John Costello (School of Physical Sciences and NCPST) for the Frontiers Project “Tracking Ultrafast Electron Dynamics in Next Generation EUV Lithography (EUVL) Materials”. The project will explore the process of EUV Lithography and examine the new ‘resist’ materials’ EUV photoabsorption cross-sections and dynamical response to EUV radiation.  The DCU team will also include Dr Mary Pryce (School of Chemical Sciences).
  • Dr Jennifer Foster (School of Computing and ADAPT) for the Frontiers Project “Rolling in the deep: unravelling a neural net’s capacity for language”. The project will develop methods and resources to analyse a deep neural network's ability to process language, with a view to understanding its strengths and limitations. The focus will initially be on the English language but will expand to other languages as the project progresses. 

 

H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS-2020 Award

Congratulations to DCU researchers who have been awarded funding under the EU H2020 call Socioeconomic and Cultural Transformations in the Context of the Fourth Industrial revolution to conduct research on rapidly changing European media landscape. 

Dr Tanya Lokot (School of Communications) will be coordinating the multi-disciplinary project “Mediatized Discourses on Europeanization and Their Representations in Public Perceptions”. The project will study how the media discourses are constructed to foster or hamper the European project and how they resonate among the public by focusing on the elite-media-public triangle. The DCU team will also include Dr Roderick Flynn (School of Communications) and Dr Alessio Cornia (School of Communications).

 

EU Horizon 2020 SC6 GOVERNANCE-21-2020 Award

Congratulations to Dr Jane Suiter (School of Communications and FuJo) who is part of the consortium which has been awarded funding under the EU Horizon 2020 GOVERNANCE-21-2020 call. The DCU team will also include Prof. Andy Way (School of Computing and ADAPT). This is one of the three projects that were funded under this call. “Developing deliberative and participatory democracies through experimentation” is an interdisciplinary project involving six European universities and will see the participation of recognised leaders in the deliberation sector. During the three years of funding, the researchers will work on the development of spaces for participation, which will allow groups of citizens, from 10 cities in 5 countries in Europe, to interact at local, national and European level through digital platforms. The objective of the project is to promote the development of participatory spaces to reduce the polarization in the political debate, strengthen the European identity, encourage social inclusion, improve the critical sense of citizens and encourage dialogue between politicians and citizens. The project is coordinated by the University of Siena.