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Promotions 2012

The following were promoted to Personal Chair:

The following were promoted to Professor:

The following were promoted to Associate Professor:

 

Personal Chairs

Hilary Biehler

hilary biehlerProfessor Hilary Biehler (BA (Mod), MLitt, PhD, LLD, Barrister-at-Law) is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and a leading academic lawyer with an international reputation for excellence in research in the fields of both public and private law. She was appointed to a lectureship in Trinity College Dublin in 1991 and has taught and supervised research at PhD level in a wide range of subjects. She currently lectures in core areas of law such as Equity and Administrative Law to freshman and sophister students. She has introduced innovative new subjects, such as Civil Procedure and Advanced Public Law, to the academic curriculum in the Law School and has been nominated for a Provost’s Teaching Award.

Professor Biehler is the author and co-author of leading monographs and books and has an international reputation particularly for her work in the fields of Equity, Judicial Review of Administrative Action and Civil Procedure. She has published 14 books and more than 70 book chapters and peer reviewed articles and has a well established reputation for the intellectual rigour of her research. The impact of her research work is clear from the frequency with which it is referred to by the courts and it has been cited more than 80 times by the Superior Courts in this jurisdiction and abroad. She was awarded an LLD by the University of Dublin in 2005 for her published work and her most recent book, Civil Procedure in the Superior Courts, co-authored with Declan McGrath, was named Law Book of the Year at the Irish Law Awards 2012.

She was a Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission from 1997-2005 and played a leading role in the formulation and publication of consultation papers and reports in wide range of areas of law and legal policy. She was instrumental in bringing to fruition projects on the reform of the law of trusts and new legislation in the form of a Trusts Bill based on this work is listed in the Government’s Legislative Programme as due for publication in 2013. She chaired a Working Group on Reform of Judicial Review Procedure which published important recommendations, a number of which were incorporated into revised secondary legislation and Superior Courts Rules which came into effect earlier this year. She also played a significant role in the Project Steering Group on Consolidation and Reform of the Courts Acts and legislation to provide for the implementation of these recommendations is due for publication in 2013.

Professor Biehler has also served in a number of leadership roles at Trinity College Dublin over the years. She has been Head of the Law School 2003-2006 and from 2008 to date. She has led it through a period of significant expansion of its programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level and oversaw the introduction of joint degrees in Law and Business and Law and Political Science and new Masters courses, the LLM in International and European Business Law and in International and Comparative Law. She also served as Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in 2010-11.

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Ciaran Brady

ciaran bradyProfessor Ciaran Brady graduated with a BA (Mod) and PhD from the University of Dublin, and joined Trinity in 1982.  A winner of the Provost’s Teaching Award in 2004, his teaching has been praised for its innovation and research-led focus.  A tutor for 10 years, he has served on Board, and played a critical role in the foundation and development of the Trinity Access Programme.  A former head of the Department of History, he is responsible for introducing a strong historiographical component to the undergraduate programme, and for pioneering the use of on-line teaching techniques and resources. He was the founding director of the new undergraduate programme in Irish Studies.

A scholar of modern Irish and British history, his work has shown how the era of state formation, religious revolution, colonisation and conquest in the 16th century was central to the emergence of the modern world.  His major intellectual biography of James Anthony Froude, published by Oxford University Press this autumn, will explore how British views of Ireland were shaped in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The author of 3 books, he has edited seven collections of essays, and served for ten years as editor of the prestigious journal Irish Historical Studies. 

He was President of the Irish Historical Society, and Naughton Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently the College’s Community Liaison Officer.  Professor Brady played a key role in the design of the new Leaving Certificate History curriculum, and through his engagement with various forms of outreach activity has consistently demonstrated the value and relevance of his discipline to a wider public.

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Stefano Sanvito

stefano sanvitoProfessor Stefano Sanvito studied Physics in Milan, Italy, (“Laurea”) and Lancaster, UK (PhD). After 2 years at the University of California Santa Barbara, in 2002 he joined the School of Physics at Trinity. In 2006 he became Associate Professor and in 2009 Deputy Director of the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN).

Professor Sanvito leads the internationally recognised Computational Spintronics Group, which develops new algorithms for materials and device modeling and applies them to problems underpinning information technology. One of Professor Sanvito’s flagship achievements is the Smeagol code, the world-leading software for simulating devices at the atomic scale. Smeagol, distributed worldwide to more than 170 groups, has impacted on a multitude of technologies ranging from data storage to DNA sequencing. Professor Sanvito is author of more than 180 papers, 2 books and numerous book chapters and he has attracted funding in excess of €20m. He is currently coordinating the European network CRONOS and a consortium with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. In 2007 he received the Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and in 2012 the prestigious European Research Council Award.

Professor Sanvito is a passionate teacher. Since being appointed to Trinity he has graduated 14 PhD/MSc students and has lectured at all levels, from undergraduate to postgraduate level. He can also be found demonstrating Physics at local primary schools in Dublin. He was the School of Physics Director of graduate studies and one of the founding members of the Dublin Region Higher Education Alliance in Physics.

Professor Sanvito is a strong international advocate of computational materials science. He is currently a member of the steering committee of a number of international bodies (Ψk, IUPAP Magnetism Commission) and sits on the advisory board of several international conferences (Spinos, JEMS, CCP).

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Yuri Volkov

yuri-volkovProfessor Yuri Volkov joined Trinity in 1995. He was awarded a MD from Moscow Medical University, a PhD from the Institute of Immunology, Moscow, and a MA (Jure Officii) from Trinity College Dublin. He was elected to Fellowship at Trinity in 2009.
Professor Volkov developed the Molecular and Translational Medicine module for the Senior Freshman medical students. The module features the original elements of Nanomedicine and Molecular Imaging and provides the students with an advantage of using the interactive response system enabling to express immediate feedback on the taught material. He is a member of the Senior Freshman medical curriculum planning and revision Committee. He is also Coordinating Committee member of the MSc in Molecular Medicine. He developed and introduced two innovative modules, Nanomedicine and Medicinal Chemistry and High Content Screening and Analysis. Under his supervision, 11 students have graduated with a PhD and he is currently supervising 3 PhD students.

He personally established the independent leading and most productive group in Nanomedicine which has gained international recognition. The research in this area enables the translation of unique properties of ultra‐small particles into groundbreaking diagnostic and therapeutic applications. A recent discovery (June 2012) made by the group, establishing the link between the environmentally presented nanoparticles and rheumatoid arthritis, gained wide international media attention. Over 20 scientific papers and patents have been published by the group over the last 2 years alone, including in leading high impact nanotech scholarly journals. He has over 120 peer‐reviewed publications and patents and has raised over €20m of research funding.

Professor Volkov is Principal Investigator at Trinity’s Institute of Molecular Medicine and CRANN. He is Coordinator and principal co‐applicant of the major past and ongoing collaborative projects – NAMDIATREAM (EU FP‐7 Large), MULTIFUN (EU FP‐7 Large), Celtic Alliance for Nanomedicine and others. He is co-founder of the Trinity spin‐off company Cellix Ltd and of the Retinoids Ltd (Moscow), which has received “The Platinum Ounce”, a Russian National Award for the outstanding contribution to the development of new pharmaceutical drugs from research into clinical practice.  He represents Trinity on high-level national and European non‐governmental advisory and policymaking bodies such as such as NanoIreland‐FORFAS, ETP Nanomedicine, FP‐7 NMP EU projects Cluster 'Targeted Nanopharmaceuticals and Early Diagnostics for Health'. He has delivered over 50 invited presentations at international research conferences and fora.

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Clive Williams

clive williamsProfessor Clive Williams joined Trinity in 1977 having graduated in Biochemistry with a BSc and PhD from University of Wales, Cardiff, and having spent 4 years researching in Chemistry in Cambridge University under the direction of Sir Alan Battersby, FRS.
He was appointed to the post of Lecturer in 1980 and subsequently to Fellow (1987) and Associate Professor (1992) being elected to Membership of The Royal Irish Academy in 1996.

He has taught in Biochemistry over many years, mainly in the areas of enzyme and protein structure-function relationships. He has supervised the training in research of 30 PhD students many of whom have gone on to careers in academia and industry.

In research, through the study of protein structure-function relationships, he has contributed many peer-reviewed papers (~130) in the domains of enzymology, neuroscience and more recently cancer drug discovery which has extended into translational medicine. Advances have been made in identifying the potential of new compounds as cancer therapeutics in intractable cancers such as mesothelioma and drug resistant lymphomas and leukaemias; and in developing light-emitting and reactive compounds which may have uses in locating tumours and in selectively eliminating them by photo-dynamic therapy. Some of these advances have been protected by patents from which Ireland and Trinity may derive benefits through the licensing of such intellectual property for development by Irish Companies such as Codex Discovery Ltd.

Professor Williams has served Trinity by being a College Tutor, Head of Department, Director of the National Pharmaceutical Biotechnology Centre and College Bursar, and as such has served on most of Trinity’s many committees as well as now playing a major role as Faculty Dean of Engineering, Mathematics and Science in Trinity’s strategy and policy direction.

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Professors

Siobhán Clarke

siobhan clarkeProfessor Siobhán Clarke holds a BSc (1986) and a PhD (2001) degrees from DCU, and joined the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College as a lecturer in 2000. Prior to that, she worked for IBM for eleven years as a senior software engineer.

Professor Clarke’s field of expertise is software engineering. She has over 110 publications in peer-reviewed venues, an h-index of 21, and over 3,500 citations. Her seminal work on software modelling has been highly influential in the field of software design. Her current research focus is on software engineering models for the provision of smart and dynamic software services to urban stakeholders, addressing research challenges in the engineering of dynamic software in ad hoc, mobile environments. She has won significant grant income (~€4m), and leads the School’s Distributed Systems Group (~60 researchers). She is co-Principal Investigator of the SFI CSET Lero, and leads Trinity’s Smart and Sustainable Cities multi-disciplinary research theme.

Professor Clarke has been the Director of the MSc in Network and Distributed Systems since 2005, which won the postgradireland Course of the Year (IT) in 2011. She was elected Fellow of Trinity in 2006, and served as the School’s Director of Postgraduate Teaching and Learning from 2008-2011. She has lectured modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level, averaging 120 contact hours per year. She has supervised 11 PhDs to completion, and is currently supervising 10 PhD students.

Professor Clarke has designed 4 new taught modules, recently winning a collaboration with Citibank in their up-Start Innovation Programme. With a focus on entrepreneurship, teams of MSc students undertake business-driven product development combining software engineering theory and practice with business innovation knowledge, and ultimately pitch to Citibank venture capital investors. Her innovations in teaching have been described as “deeply impressive” during international review.

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Gerald Dawe

gerald daweGerald Dawe was appointed to Trinity College Dublin as Lecturer in English in 1988. He lectures at all levels of undergraduate study and has supervised numerous graduate theses in the School of English as well as acting as external examiner in universities in both Ireland and the UK. He has been involved in leading innovations throughout his career, both within the academy and in the wider community, particularly in the field of creative writing.

He is director of the internationally recognised Masters programme in creative writing (the first of its kind offered by an Irish university) which he established with Professor Emeritus Brendan Kennelly in 1998 and has been director of the Oscar Wilde Centre since its foundation in the same year. He was also founding editor of Krino: The Review (1986-1996).

A distinguished poet and critic, he has published 8 collections of poetry, including Selected Poems (2012). His critical work includes The Proper Word: Collected Criticism (2007) and he has edited several key anthologies of Irish poetry including The Younger Irish Poets (1982; 1991) and the groundbreaking Earth Voices Whispering: an anthology of Irish war poetry 1914-1945 (2008). His main research interests are in modern poetry, comparative literature and Irish cultural history.

Amongst his various awards, he is a recipient of a Northern Ireland Department of Education Major State Award, the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature and recently was awarded a Moore Institute Research Fellowship from National University of Ireland, Galway. A Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and of the English Association (UK), Dawe has been John J Burns Visiting Professor at Boston College and Charles Heimbold Professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia.

He has served on various advisory boards including the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast and on judging panels of national and international literary awards such as IMPAC, The Rooney Prize for Literature and the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award. Currently working on a study of Crisis in 20th Irish writing and completing a work of literary memoir, Gerald Dawe has given readings and lectures in many parts of the world. He is married with two children and lives in County Dublin.

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Anne-Marie Healy

anne-marie healyProfessor Anne Marie Healy has a BSc and PhD both from the University of Dublin. In 1992 she joined Trinity College Dublin as a Lecturer in Pharmaceutics. In 2010 she was elected Fellow of Trinity College.

Professor Healy has taught on the Pharmacy degree course since 1992; she teaches on 3 postgraduate Diploma/Masters courses. As Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning (2008-2012) she successfully led the introduction of a new revised modularised curriculum for the Pharmacy degree. She has supervised 10 PhD students to graduation and is currently supervisor of 6 PhD students.

Professor Healy has secured in excess of €2m in research funding over the last 5 years. She has 56 peer reviewed publications: 2 book chapters, 46 journal articles and 8 papers in conference proceedings. She has given over 100 presentations at national and international conferences and mentored 8 postdoctoral researchers. She is co-Principal Investigator of the Solid State Pharmaceutical Cluster. The Cluster involves 5 academic and 10 industrial partners (pharmaceutical companies). The research of the cluster, and her research in general, is aligned with one of the 14 priority areas for research identified by the recent National Research Prioritisation Exercise (NRPE), namely “Therapeutics: Synthesis, Formulation, Processing and Drug Delivery”.

She has served College and the Pharmacy discipline as Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning (2008-2012), College Tutor (1998-2008), Member of the Curriculum Development sub-forum of the National Pharmacy Forum (2011 to date), Member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland’s Steering Group for the Pharmacy Education and Accreditation Reviews project (2008-2010) and Member of the Council of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland (1997-2006).

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Darryl Jones

darryl jonesDarryl Jones graduated with first-class honours in English from the University of York in 1989, and in 1994 was awarded a PhD, also from York, on the novels of Jane Austen.  He came to Trinity in 1994, as a Lecturer in English.  He was a College Tutor from 2002-9.

Professor Jones’s teaching and research are largely focused on 19th century fiction, with a particular emphasis on popular fiction, a subject which he introduced to the School of English, and which has since become one of its major fields of teaching and research.  In 2004, he was the co-founder of the MPhil programme in Popular Literature (at the time the only one of its kind in the world), and was for a number of years Director of the programme.  He is currently supervising 11 PhD students working in this field.

Professor Jones is the author or editor of 9 books, including most recently the first scholarly edition of the Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, which has been extremely widely reviewed in the international press, and praised as ‘definitive’, ‘first-rate’ and ‘exemplary’.  He has also written books on, amongst other subjects, poetry (2000, 2011), horror fiction and film (2002), Jane Austen (2004) and the 1950s (2011, with another forthcoming in 2013).  He is currently working on The Oxford Book of Horror Stories, and a monograph entitled Dead London: Representing the Shadow-City in the Nineteenth Century.  He has also written 22 peer-reviewed articles, with a number of others forthcoming.

From 2009-12, Professor Jones was Head of the School of English.  In 2012, the School was ranked 14th in the QS World University Rankings of English Departments (and in the top 3 in Europe, alongside Oxford and Cambridge).  This makes English the highest-ranked subject area internationally in Trinity.

Professor Jones is a frequent speaker at international conferences and in the media.  In 2012, he organized a conference in Trinity on The Idea of a University in the 21st Century, which gathered together university heads and senior academics from Ireland and the UK at a crucial time in the history of third-level education.

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David Lloyd

david lloydProfessor David Lloyd has a BSc degree in Applied Chemistry, from Dublin City University, and a PhD in Organic/Medicinal Chemistry, also from DCU, on the design of novel antimalarial agents. He spent 3 years as a BioResearch Ireland postdoctoral fellow in the School of Pharmacy in Trinity College Dublin, working on the design of novel breast cancer therapeutics, before moving to Cambridge as Senior Scientist in De Novo Pharmaceuticals. From 2001-2004, in this industrial setting, he worked on a range of commercial drug discovery projects. He returned to Ireland and to Trinity in 2004 as the Hitachi Lectureship in Advanced Computing in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology.

While the Hitachi Lectureship was an endowed research lectureship, he undertook undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, starting up and delivering new courses in proteomics and computational drug design, core chemistry and in molecular modelling. Since founding the Molecular Design Group in 2004, 15 final year undergraduates have completed their research dissertations under his supervision, while at postgraduate level, 2 MSc and 6 PhD students have completed to date, with 2 MSc and 3 PhD students training in the group currently. Additionally, 5 visiting researchers and 12 postdoctoral fellows have trained with the group over this time.

Professor Lloyd uses computers to design molecules that may have use as medicines of the future. Drug design is interdisciplinary, spanning computation, chemistry, biology and biomedicine. The group spans multiple disease areas – primarily cancer, where they work on lung, breast and prostate, and inflammation, where they work on asthma, sepsis and neurodegenerative disease. They publish in the highest ranked journals in their field, to date they have output 52 original papers and 2 book chapters. To date they have raised over €2.5m in direct research funding, €1.5m via international collaborations and secured in excess of €150m in competitive funding as a co-author of major research programme, project and infrastructure grants. In 2008 Professor Lloyd was elected to Fellowship of Trinity College Dublin and in 2012 as a Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry.

Professor Lloyd has been heavily involved in the executive management of the College for the past 7 years. In 2005 he was appointed as Trinity’s first Associate Dean of Research. From 2007-2011, he served as the College’s Dean of Research. In September 2011, he became Bursar and Director of Strategic Innovation.

He works with and has co-authored publications with leading academic groups from the USA, Israel, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy and the UK and with industry partners including IBM and Johnson & Johnson. Current collaborations include projects with Dell and the Structural Genomics Consortium. Beyond scholarly output, 4 patents have been produced from the group’s research, with two spin out companies formed as direct commercialisation vehicles. He is a former Board member and current Leonardo of the Science Gallery and has acted as a founding director on 3 national ventures – the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC), the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) and Molecular Medicine Ireland (MMI). He is currently on the Board of Directors of HEAnet Ltd. In 2011, he was appointed as a member of the National Advisory Council for Science Technology and Innovation (ACSTI) and in 2012 he was appointed as the Inaugural Chair of the Irish Research Council.

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Mike Lyons

mike lyonsProfessor Michael EG Lyons, BSc (NUI), MA (Dub), PhD(NUI), FTCD, has been to date Associate Professor, Physical Chemistry, School of Chemistry and is SFI Principal Investigator in the School of Chemistry, Trinity College Dublin. He is a graduate of University College Cork (BSc 1979) where he read Chemistry and Mathematical Physics and obtained his PhD degree from the same University in 1983 under the supervision of Professor Declan Burke in metal oxide electrochemistry. He worked with Professor John Albery and Professor Brian Steele at Imperial College London on metal oxide electrocatalysis before being appointed to a lectureship in Physical Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin in 1984. Professor Lyons is a Teacher/Scholar and has carried a full teaching and examining load throughout his career where he has lectured on a broad range of topics in Physical and Materials Chemistry from Freshman to Sophister and Graduate. He has successfully supervised 9 Masters and 16 Doctoral students to completion. He is currently supervising 1 PhD and 1 Post Doctoral Fellow. Another PhD candidate will begin research in September. Professor Lyons has served as a successful College Tutor since 1992.

Professor Lyons was elected to Fellowship, Trinity College Dublin in 1992 on the basis of publication and research. His research interests encompass Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry and in a publication output of 2 books and more than 100 peer reviewed papers he has made significant contributions to electrode kinetics, metal oxide electrocatalysis, electroactive polymer electrochemistry, electrochemical sensors and the mathematical modelling of electrochemical systems. His H-index is 24 and the average cite per paper is 18.78. He is currently in receipt of a 5-year SFI Principal Investigator award (2011-2016) which has enabled the establishment of the Trinity Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Electrocatalysis (TEECE) Group within the School of Chemistry whose remit is to understand and optimise the technologically important electrochemical water splitting process for clean sustainable energy conversion  applications. He has successfully raised more than €1.5m in external research funding since 2002. He has lectured extensively in UK, Europe, US, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand.

Professor Lyons has served both on the University Academic Council and the Governing Body (Board) of Trinity College, and has been Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning and Head of Physical Materials and Computational Chemistry within the School of Chemistry. He was Director of Science of materials for some years.

Professor Lyons is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Solid State Electrochemistry and the International Journal of Electrochemical Science. He served as Project co-ordinator for the EU/LA ALFA Project Materials Engineering for the Design of Intelligent Sensors (Project MEDIS) with partners located in Universities in Belgium, France, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. He is the Conference Chair of the forthcoming Electrochem 2012 which will be held in Trinity this September.

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Ross McManus

ross mcmanusProfessor Ross McManus, BA (Mod), PhD, FTCD, graduated in genetics before completing his doctorate in genetics in TCD. He went on to study the genetics of complex diseases and in 1994, was involved in the groundbreaking discovery of the BRCA2 breast cancer susceptibility gene, which was published in the journal Science.  He was appointed a Wellcome Trust/HRB ‘New Blood’ Lecturer in the Department of Clinical Medicine in Trinity in 1998. He has since focused on the genomics of important inherited conditions, including coeliac disease, inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis and sepsis among others. He has been involved in several major national and international collaborative investigations into these diseases, leading to over 75 peer-reviewed publications with more than 4,100 citations, many in journals of the highest impact internationally. He is an inventor on seven patents and has been awarded in excess of €5M in research funding from agencies including the HRB, SFI and the Wellcome Trust.

Professor McManus is Director of the Postgraduate Training Programme in Molecular Medicine, comprising Diploma, Masters and Structured Doctoral degrees. He is chair of the Eurolife Educational Alliance, comprising Trinity and 7 other leading European universities, promoting leadership in postgraduate education and student exchanges across Europe and developing a common doctoral training programme within the Eurolife network. He has supervised 7 completed PhD students with 5 more in training.

Professor McManus was co-ordinator of Eurolife from 2008-2011 and is a member of the Molecular Medicine Ireland education committee. He was a curator of Trinity's Science Gallery’s highly successful HUMAN+ exhibition in 2011.

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Sinead Ryan

sinead ryanProfessor Sinead Ryan has a PhD (1997) from University of Edinburgh, MSc (1993) from University College Cork and a BSc (1992) from University College Cork.  From 1996-1999 she was employed as a Research Associate at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, USA.  In 1999 she was appointed as a Lecturer in High-Performance Computing at Trinity College Dublin and from 2000 to Lecturer  and 2006 to Senior Lecturer at the School of Mathematics at Trinity. In 2003 she was elected to Fellowship at Trinity.

Professor Ryan’s research is in theoretical particle physics and in particular the study of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong nuclear force. Through numerical simulation and by theoretical calculations the aim is to understand one of the fundamental forces and its role in the Standard Model of particle physics and beyond.

Her current interests are the spectroscopy of hadrons at zero temperature and QCD at finite temperature.  She has published highly-cited papers in high-impact journals and given invited plenary talks at conferences. She collaborates internationally and is a scientist in charge at Trinity for an EU-funded network. She is a reviewer for international journals and has served on international advisory and organising committees for major symposia. 
Professor Ryan has taught at all levels in Trinity and supervised final year projects and summer research students. She is the course director of theoretical physics. She has served as College tutor. She has supervised a number of PhD students to completion, funded by SFI, IRCSET, the EU and through Trinity scholarships.

She represented Trinity on an RIA committee and served on the governing board of the School of Theoretical Physics at DIAS. She is a Science Gallery Leonardo and a regular speaker at the College's and the School's open days. She has been a WISER mentor and is currently the Director of Research for the School and a College theme champion. 

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Virpi Timonen

virpi timonenProfessor Virpi Timonen is a graduate of the University of Durham (BA, 1995), and the University of Oxford (MPhil, 1997 and DPhil, 2001). She was first appointed to Trinity in 2003, and established the Social Policy and Ageing Research Centre (SPARC) in 2005. Professor Timonen has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and chapters on social gerontology and welfare state responses to population ageing in leading international journals and books. She has authored 5 books, and co-edited the first book on grandparenting practices across the world. Her original scholarship on long-term care and intergenerational relations is internationally recognised.

Professor Timonen collaborates with colleagues in Ireland, Europe and North America, and has won grants in excess of €2m towards research and post-graduate / post-doctoral training. She is currently on the Boards of the Network for European Social Policy Analysis (ESPAnet) and the Research Committee on Ageing of the International Sociological Association (ISA).

Professor Timonen has supervised to successful completion the first 6 PhDs to have graduated in social gerontology in Trinity, and is currently supervising 4 PhD students. She has designed 6 new undergraduate courses and authored Ageing Societies, a major undergraduate textbook.
Professor Timonen is a co-investigator in the Irish Longitudinal Study of Ageing (TILDA) and chairs its Translational Research and Policy Implementation sub-committee. Alongside and related to her academic publications, Professor Timonen has made influential contributions to policy formulation and critique in the area of long-term care services, in particular home care provision in Ireland and other European countries.

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Associate Professors

Peter Cherry

petercherryPeter Cherry joined the Department of History of Art and Architecture of Trinity College in September, 1990, and was elected to Fellowship in 2003. He earned a BA in the History of Art at The University of Essex and, in 1991, his PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. His research focuses on art in Spain in the 17th century, and he is particularly well known for his work in the field of still-life and genre painting. Ongoing research is devoted to the mechanisms and resources for the production of paintings in the 17th century, the role of art patrons, the Spanish religious image, Spanish portraiture, small-format paintings in Spain, and cultures of plague in Early Modern Spain. A complete list of publications can be found on Cherry’s page on the TCD Research Support System.

In his teaching, Cherry conducts a final-year undergraduate course based on his research area, Art and Religion in the Hispanic World, which is also open to students from the Department of Hispanic Studies. In alternate years, he teaches courses on Art in the Italian Renaissance and 17th Century Europe, also designed by him. He contributes to the team-taught courses in the department on Art in Northern Europe, Approaches to Art History and the survey courses offered to Junior Freshmen, and supervises final-year research dissertations. He teaches on the School of Histories and Humanities interdisciplinary MPhil course, “From Reform to Revolution: Cultural Change and Political Conflict in Early-Modern Europe”, the School Elective, “Representations of the Individual in Western Civilisation”, and the School extramural series, “Man’s Inhumanity to Man. Atrocities in History: Reality, Myth, Memory”. He has supervised 8 successful PhD students and one MLitt student. These research projects have included such wide-ranging themes as the history of drawing and print, religious art in Spain, Italian Renaissance sculpture, royal portraiture, and 20th century art in Ireland and Germany, among others. He currently has 3 PhD students; one works on art patronage in 16th century Italy, another on Italian artistic practices in the 17th century, and the third is registered on the doctoral programme in Digital Arts and Humanities, considering images in the Fagel Collection of the Library. He also supervises an MLitt student studying the terminology of Italian artistic treatises. He has acted as internal examiner for 6 research students in the department and regularly acts as a reader for post-graduate progress reviews in the School of Histories and Humanities, and beyond. Cherry is an enthusiastic teacher, who prioritises engagement with the work of art. He takes a questioning approach to issues and relies upon a high degree of participatory discussion in class, in order to develop powers of visual analysis and the scholarly imagination in students, as well as confidence in the expression of their views. He takes advantage of current digital technology which has revolutionised the study of works of art. From their first year in College, however, student seminars are held in museums and galleries, in order to cultivate analytical engagement with actual works of art. Courses are regularly reviewed by means of student surveys, which are considered carefully and acted upon.

With regard to his contribution to the discipline of Art History, Cherry has presented different aspects of his research at academic conferences and symposia organised at the following institutions: The University of Oxford; The Courtauld Institute of Art; The University of Aberdeen; University College Cork; the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid; Casa de Velázquez, Madrid; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid; Fundación Duques de Soria, Seminario de Historia del Arte; Centro Velázquez, Fundación Focus-Abengoa, Seville; and at sessions organised by The Renaissance Society of America, Artes (Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group) and at the Conference of Irish Historians. Recently, he was a member of the organising committee for the conference “Vicente Carducho’s Diálogos de la pintura (1633)”, University of Oxford (April, 2011). Cherry is also committed to reaching audiences beyond the academy. He was a member of the selection panel for Masterpiece: Ireland’s Most-Loved Paintings, Yellow Asylum Films and RTE (2012). He has long been a regular and enthusiastic contributor of public lectures and presentations at major institutions in Ireland and abroad, such as The National Gallery of Ireland, The National Gallery, London, and The Museo del Prado, Madrid. Last year he gave the prestigious Ramón Pérez de Ayala Lecture at The University of Portsmouth, funded by the Spanish Embassy, which is dedicated to raising awareness of Spanish culture in the public sphere. He has been able to translate his research into the high-impact medium of international loan exhibitions on Spanish art, which have recorded impressive attendance figures and enjoyed critical success, including: In the Presence of Things: Four Centuries of European Still-Life Painting at Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2010); Luis Meléndez, Still Lifes, co-curated with Juan Luna, at the Museo Nacional del Prado and The National Gallery of Ireland (2004); Murillo: Scenes of Childhood, co-curated with Xanthe Brooke, at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2001), and which travelled to the Alte Pinakothek, Munich and the Museo del Prado; and Spanish Still Life from Velázquez to Goya, co-curated with William Jordan, at The National Gallery, London (1995).

Beyond his teaching and research, Peter Cherry has undertaken a wide range of academic commitments. He was external examiner for the MA in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Limerick (2007-10) and has acted as external examiner for PhD theses on different aspects of Spanish and Italian art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, The University of Essex, The University of Bristol, The Universidad Complutense de Madrid, University College Dublin, and University College Cork. He is a founding member of Artes: Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group; member of The Renaissance Society of America, and Irish Association of Art Historians. He forms part of the international editorial committees of the following journals: Archivo Español de Arte, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid; Revista Goya, Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid; Anales de Historia del Arte, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Ars Longa. Cuadernos de Arte, the Universidad de Valencia; and was a founding member of the editorial board of Artefact: The Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians. He has been peer reviewer for Yale University Press; peer reviewer for the senior promotions committee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2009); a member of the awards committee for the II Premio Internacional Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Fundación Focus-Abengoa, Seville (2010); member of senior appointments committee for the National Gallery of Ireland (2008); and advisor to the Acceptance in Lieu scheme of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, UK (2005). He has served on the board of The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (1997-2006) and the board of the National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, University of Limerick (2006-09). He has been nominated to serve as titular member for Ireland on the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art from 2012, and as a member of the Vetting Committee of TEFAF Maastricht from 2013.

Cherry has served his department, School and the College in a number of capacities. He has been Head of Discipline (2006-2009; Hilary Term 2013) and is currently in his second term as Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning for the School of Histories and Humanities. He is Head of First Year, has been Erasmus and visiting student co-ordinator for the department since 2004, and organises the departmental History of Art Research and Methodology seminars. He is a board member of Trinity College Irish Art Research Centre (Triarc) and a founding member of the board of the Centre for Early Modern History in the School of Histories and Humanities (2011). Cherry has had a long-standing involvement with the College art collections. He was Curator of the College Modern Art Collection (1992-2007) and is currently Chair of the College Art Collections Advisory Group. He played a significant role in helping to secure a professional Curator of College Collections in 2007. He was Assistant to the Junior Dean (1992- 2002) and has acted on a number of College appointments committees for departmental and School posts, and for Conservation Department of the Library.

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Derek Doherty

derekdohertyDerek Doherty completed his PhD studies at King’s College School of Medicine and Dentistry, London and postdoctoral research in the University of Washington, Seattle and University College Dublin before holding lecturing positions at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and subsequently Trinity College Dublin which he joined as a lecturer in 2008.  He was awarded a BA (Mod) honours degree in Biochemistry, Trinity College Dublin in 1982. In 1986 he was awarded a MSc by thesis in Molecular Virology, The Queen's University of Belfast. In 1987, he received a post-experience certificate in Immunology, King's College London, University of London. He graduated with a PhD in Molecular Immunogenetics from King's College School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London in 1993.  Professor Doherty was elected to Fellowship in 2012.

As interim Head of Discipline of Immunology, Professor Doherty is responsible for all teaching provided by this department.  He teaches immunology to science and medical undergraduate students by way of lecturing and supervising research projects and runs workshops on global health and the humanities for medical students. His main contribution to teaching is at postgraduate level and he has supervised 7 PhD students to completion and is currently supervising an additional 7 PhD students.  He also sits on PhD committees and provides rotation projects for students in 3 structured PhD programmes.  Professor Doherty also is lecturer and project supervisor of postgraduate students taking the MSc in Molecular Medicine and the new MSc in Translational Oncology and is module coordinator in the new MSc programme in Immunology.  Previously, he designed, coordinated and delivered courses in biochemistry, cell biology, genetics, animal physiology and immunology and was proposer and director of the MSc programme in Immunology and Global Health at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Professor Doherty also trains students from East Africa as part of the Combat Diseases of Poverty Consortium, medical students doing research electives and undergraduates doing summer projects.

For over a decade, Professor Doherty has led a research group, financed by about €3m raised through personal grant applications. He has published 75 papers (including 65 in international peer-reviewed scientific journals, 5 full-length articles in conference proceedings and 5 book chapters).   His work has elicited over 2800 citations, giving an h-index of 29.  Professor Doherty’s research is focused on the mechanisms by which the immune system can protect against or cause disease in humans and how it can be manipulated for the development of novel therapies.  He used molecular methods to define the genes that predispose individuals to a number of autoimmune diseases of the liver and his research on one of these (autoimmune hepatitis) enabled the subdivision of the disease into distinct types that have different treatment requirements.  By analysing the immune composition of human liver, he characterised novel T cells, known as innate lymphocytes, which appear to be “master regulators” of the immune system, being able to determine the type and strength of an immune response, and which are defective in many infectious and immune-mediated diseases and cancers.  In collaboration with clinical colleagues at Trinity, Professor Doherty is studying innate lymphocytes in patients with hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, HIV, respiratory syncytial virus, oesophageal cancer, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, septic shock, systemic lupus erythematosus, coeliac disease, antibody deficiencies and granulomatosus with polyangiitis.  The results show that various innate lymphocyte populations can be manipulated to promote the generation of desirable immune responses for the treatment of disease.  A major goal is to develop cellular therapies for global infectious diseases, in particular HIV, and to this end his group has generated data that suggest that therapeutic activation of one innate lymphocyte subset may halt the development of AIDS.  This work has led to funded collaborations with researchers in Uganda, with whom he hopes to implement interventions that will improve the wellbeing of HIV-positive people in Uganda and similar environments throughout Africa.

As Head of Discipline of Immunology in the School of Medicine, Professor Doherty is responsible for staff both in the “Human Cellular Immunology” research laboratories in Trinity’s Institute of Molecular Medicine and in the Clinical Immunology Department at St James’s Hospital, where routine clinical immunology testing is carried out.  The Clinical Immunology Department generates income by doing tests outsourced by other hospitals, which is administered by TCD and funds a number of salaries in both labs and helps develop new tests for future commercialisation.  Dr Doherty has set up and now manages 2 research laboratories that currently house 13 researchers (10 PhD students and 3 postdoctoral researchers) as well as several other PhD and MD students from other groups that are doing parts of their research degrees in the lab. The lab is also a training ground for medical and science undergraduates, MSc students, PhD rotation students and summer students (typically 15 per year) doing 2-4-month projects.  As well as coordinating the Immunology Department’s teaching commitments and financial affairs, Dr Doherty sits on a number of committees responsible for aspects of postgraduate teaching and day-to-day running of the Institute of Molecular Medicine.

Professor Doherty contributes to the wider disciplines of immunology and medicine by sitting on grant review committees (such as Science Foundation Ireland and the Health Research Board), by peer-reviewing articles submitted for publication in biomedical journals, by acting as internal and external examiner of undergraduate degree courses and PhD students and by speaking at meetings of academic societies.  As a committee member (and formerly secretary) of the Irish Society for Immunology, he contributes to the organisation of an annual scientific conference and 2 public lectures every year.  As a member of the “Combat Diseases of Poverty Consortium” and the recently-formed HIV/Nutrition Research Cluster, termed “Nourish”, he contributes to capacity building and the design of interventions to combat poverty-related diseases in East Africa.  In his capacity as teacher, he is committed to inspiring secondary level students to study science through delivery of lectures at schools and public venues and by hosting transition year students doing work placements.

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Catherine Donnelly

Professor Catherine Donnelly has an LLB from Trinity College Dublin (1st Class), where she was a Scholar of the University; as well as a BCL (1st Class) and DPhil from the University of Oxford and an LLM from Harvard Law School.  She is a practising barrister in Dublin and London and a member of a leading London chambers, Blackstone Chambers and has also qualified as an Attorney at Law in New York (State and Federal).  She joined Trinity College in January 2007 and became a Fellow in 2011.  She practised as a litigation attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York from 1999 to 2001, during which time she also lectured at the University of Columbia and she was a tenured Tutorial Fellow of Wadham College and University Lecturer at the University of Oxford from 2005-2007.
 
Professor Donnelly lectures both undergraduate and graduate students and currently supervises a large number of PhD (9), MLitt (1), LLM (4) and LLB Dissertation (1) students and since starting in Trinity, has supervised 21 students to completion of their research.  Her teaching duties are broad and include Administrative Law, Advanced European Union Law and Human Rights Law (which modules she designed) as well as entirely new modules which she has created and which had not previously been offered to students, namely, Comparative Public Law, European Human Rights, Public Law of the European Union and Public Procurement Law (the first such course ever taught in any Irish University), as well as Ethics in Neuroimaging for the MSc and PhD programmes in Neuroscience.  Her average teaching load since she has started lecturing has been 122 hours per year.  She places significant emphasis on comparative learning in all of her modules—for example, broadening student career options by teaching UK Constitutionalism in Administrative Law— and has been invited to lecture and publish on her experiences of legal education in different jurisdictions.  Combining traditional examinations with essay assessment and class discussion and presentations, she also focuses on the interaction between academic and practical law, and considers it important to facilitate engagement between esteemed legal practitioners and students.    

Professor Donnelly writes in the areas of Administrative Law, European Union Law, Human Rights Law and Public Procurement Law.  In 2007, she published a book entitled, “Delegation of Governmental Power to Private Parties: A Comparative Perspective”, which was published by Oxford University Press, launched by Dr Mary Robinson, shortlisted for the Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks’ Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2008 (UK) and cited extensively by international courts.  She is also an editor of “De Smith’s Judicial Review”, which is the leading Administrative Law textbook in the common law world and cited in academic work and courts including Supreme Courts in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and the US.  To give an example, on Westlaw UK, a search for the book produces 339 citations in “Journals” and 3,994 citations in “Cases” and on HeinOnline, it produces 2,282 citations.  Indeed such is the demand for the book that a special South-East Asia edition was published in 2009.  She has also published widely in international peer-reviewed book collaborations and international peer-reviewed journals, including the US journal, Law and Ethics of Human Rights, the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, the Public Procurement Law Review (the leading journal in this field) and Public Law, the leading journal in this area and ranked in the top 5 of 588 UK journals.  Her work has been cited very widely, including for example, in the Fordham Law Review, International Journal of Constitutional Law (US), Modern Law Review (UK) and the European Law Review and has been translated into French, Spanish and Chinese.  In total, she has written peer-reviewed books (4), peer-reviewed book chapters (13), peer-reviewed journal articles (9), peer-reviewed conference proceedings/papers (31), and had a number of publications subject to external evaluation (17).  The total research funding she has achieved since 2005 has been €207k, including a University of Oxford Fellowship Award 2004, and awards from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Northern Ireland Bill of Rights Forum.  She is currently involved in a joint grant collaboration with colleagues in the University of Cambridge.  In recognition of her work in Public Procurement Law, she was recently listed in the International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers 2012.  More generally, her research has been cited frequently by courts, both domestically and internationally.

In addition to performing a range of significant administrative roles in Oxford, at both College and University level, in Trinity College,  Professor Donnelly was appointed in 2008 as the Law School representative to set up a new interdisciplinary degree in Law and Business and have acted as Law and Business Co-Director (since 2009).  Additional positions have included: Law School’s Disabilities Liaison Officer (2009-2011); member of the Postgraduate Students Academic Appeals Committee; and Trinity College representative on the Joint Department of Foreign Affairs/NGO Standing Committee on Human Rights.  She also became a tutor almost immediately upon arriving in Trinity College, in 2007.

She has received numerous invitations to speak to academic and public audiences in Ireland, the UK, the EU and beyond, including the Sorbonne in Paris; the European University Institute in Florence; the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; and Sydney University and the University of Melbourne.  She has been invited to join collaborations by Professors from Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford, such as the Yale Law School Comparative Administrative Law Initiative.  Significant positions she has held include: Principal Legal Advisor, Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (2008-2010); and Legal Advisor, Northern Ireland Bill of Rights Forum (2007-2010).  She is currently a Committee Member of the Irish Society for European Law, a Committee and Founding Member of the Procurement Law Forum—in which capacities she organises regular seminars and conferences—and a member of the Dornburg Research Group.  She is a regular peer-reviewer for a number of international journals and has acted as an external examiner, including at the University of Oxford.  She is consulted by and represents, on a pro bono basis, a wide range of NGOs and charities and has been invited to train the UK judiciary and various Irish public servants.  She has represented the Irish State in a number of significant cases, including, successfully defending the challenge over the summer, in the High Court and the Supreme Court, by Thomas Pringle TD, to Ireland’s ratification of the European Stability Mechanism Treaty.

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Oran Doyle

oran-doyleProfessor Oran Doyle holds an LLB and PhD from Trinity College Dublin and an LLM from Harvard Law School. He also holds the degree of Barrister-at-law from the Honourable Society of King’s Inns. He joined the College as a lecturer in September 2004.

He currently lectures 3 modules. Constitutional law 1 is a large introductory module for freshman students (c180). He also lectures jurisprudence (c80) and legal philosophy (c15) to sophister students. As well as preparation and class contact hours, the work on these modules includes liaising with seminar tutors, correcting compulsory essays and monitoring internet discussions on topics relevant to the modules. Each year, he supervises a number of dissertations on the LLB and LLM programmes. He has also supervised a number of postgraduate research students, generally within the areas of constitutional law and jurisprudence. In the past 18 months, 1 student has completed her PhD, 2 have submitted their PhD theses for examination, and 2 have been awarded MLitts, subject to minor corrections. He is currently supervising 4 other PhD students. As a lecturer, he has introduced several innovations in law-teaching. Along with a number of colleagues in the Law School, he has pioneered a mixed Socratic-Lecturing style for his large classes. Classes are conducted on the basis that students will have read material in advance and be in a position to answer questions on the material. To facilitate this approach in constitutional law, he published Constitutional Law: Text, Cases and Materials in 2008. He has also introduced a requirement for students to participate in an online discussion board focused on each module: this provides a valuable opportunity for students to formulate their own thoughts right from the start of the module and to learn from one another. With another colleague, he introduced co-teaching for the legal philosophy module, whereby they both attend all classes and jointly lead a discussion with the students. This approach has now been adopted by a number of other lecturers in the Law School.

As Director of Teaching and Learning (Undergraduate), he led discussions on redesigning the core LLB curriculum in order to accommodate modularisation and semesterisation. Rather than treat this as a burdensome administrative requirement, they used it as an opportunity to reconsider the content of the curriculum and update it to provide a better grounding in law for their students. They introduced new freshman modules, such as legislation and regulation, and have introduced greater flexibility in the number and length of sophister modules. The Law School now offers c30 option modules to its sophister students. He has also redesigned the Law and French programme and designed the law components of the very successful Law and Business and Law and Political Science programmes.

Professor Doyle received a Provost’s Teaching Award in 2008 and has been a college tutor since 2006. He has focused his research on the 2 areas in which he has done most of his teaching, namely constitutional law and jurisprudence. Constitutional law concerns the basic law of the State: how the State is established, the different organs of government, relationships between those organs of government and the rights granted to citizens to protect them from those organs of government. Jurisprudence concerns the general philosophy of law and explores questions such as the following: What is law? What are rights? What are the relationships between law and morality? Can people be under an obligation to obey the law? What (if anything) makes law legitimate? He has written about Irish constitutional law in a jurisprudential way, seeking to question the basic ideas underpinning the Constitution and judicial interpretations of that text. For instance, in Constitutional Equality Law (2004), he provided an exhaustive analysis of the Irish courts’ treatment of the Constitution’s equality guarantee and argued that the courts had regrettably focused on classifications as the paradigm of an equality wrong instead of the continued subordination experienced by unjustly subordinated groups. In “Sisterly Love: the Importance of Explicitly Assumed Commitment in the Legal Recognition of Personal Relationships” (2010), he analysed a decision of the European Court of Human Rights which held that it was permissible for the UK to withhold tax breaks from sisters while providing those tax breaks to civil partners. He argued that states are justified in providing preferential treatment to those willing to undertake exclusive and binding commitments to each other.

He has published 18 books and articles that have been subject to peer-review or equivalent process. Many of these have been cited in other publications. Constitutional Law: Text, Cases and Materials (2008) has sold nearly 2,000 copies and has become the standard constitutional law textbook in many universities and colleges in Ireland. He received €21,750 in research funding for completing reports for the European Commission on the transposition and implementation of various EU Directives. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 2010. He is an executive board member of the International Academy for the Study of the Jurisprudence of the Family and is a founding member of the Irish Jurisprudence Society.
He has served the College in a number of different roles. He has spent 3 years as the Law School’s Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning. As well as overseeing all undergraduate teaching within the School across 5 degrees, he participated in the formation of college policy on undergraduate teaching and learning. He also served on the College’s Equality Committee and the Health Faculty Research Ethics Committee for a number of years. He is an occasional member of the College’s Academic Appeals Committee, providing a legal perspective on student cases. Within the Law School, he established the School’s Constitutional Law and Policy Group to provide a focus for the School’s scholarship in this area.

Professor Doyle has engaged with the academic community in his disciplines through the organisation of (and attendance at) various conferences and symposia. He has organised conferences on State recognition of committed relationships, the Constitution (to mark the 70th anniversary of its enactment) and the communal law of human communities. In 2007, he established the Irish Jurisprudence Society to provide a forum for jurisprudential debate and analysis. They have held 10 series of workshops, at which academics and research students presented work in progress, and have organised 3 public lectures, by Joseph Raz, William Twining and Philip Pettit.

Professor Doyle has engaged with society as a commentator on issues of constitutional law and reform. He has written several articles for the Irish Times and has appeared on radio and television on a number of occasions. In March 2012, he met a group of TDs and Senators in Leinster House to discuss the proposed children’s rights referendum. He has blogged on constitutional reform at www.humanrights.ie and has been asked by the Department of An Taoiseach to assist with the planned constitutional convention. As a barrister, he represented a number of clients on a pro bono basis, arguing constitutional and human rights cases before the High Court and the Supreme Court.

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Mauro Ferreira

mauro-ferreiraProfessor Mauro Ferreira joined Trinity College Dublin in March 2002. He was elected to Fellowship at Trinity in 2010. He was awarded a PhD in Mathematical Physics in 1998 from the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, UK and a BSc in Physics and MSc in Solid State Physics (1991 and 1993, respectively) from the Department of Physics, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil.

As a Mathematical Physicist, he has the natural enthusiasm for modeling the physical world in mathematical terms and this is one of the driving forces in his research. In particular, being fully aware of the inevitable complexities involved in computational calculations that are common in modern science, he strives to include a mathematically transparent formalism to support any numerically-based claim he makes, something that regrettably is overlooked by many scientists. As a matter of fact, mathematical transparency is one of the key trademarks of his research. Strong emphasis of his research has been on the physical properties of low-dimensional systems such as surfaces, thin films, multilayers and nanotubes.

When studying the interaction of polymers and nanotubes, a combination that enables the formation of composite materials with fascinating physical properties, his group has managed to:

  1. explain the formation of a well-ordered polymeric layer surrounding the nanotubes;
  2.  understand why this affects the physical properties of nanotube-polymer composites so strongly;
  3. predict the polymer/nanotube combination that produces the best crystalline coating and establish how the mechanical and electronic properties are affected by the polymeric coating.

The impact: makes stronger yet light-weight plastics with direct consequences to the plastics industry.

When studying the interaction between carbon nanotubes and magnetic objects such as substrates and nanoparticles, his group has:

  1. established the conditions for the occurrence of spin-polarized charge transfer between a magnetic surface and a nanotube. One of his papers on this topic has been cited in the “Top Papers 2004”, highlighting the most popular articles in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. It has also been mentioned in the Physics Web article “Carbon nanotubes go magnetic”, a publication from the Institute of Physics (IOP), UK;
  2. established how magnetic particles can couple through the non-magnetic environment of nanotubes;
  3. put forward a number of ideas where spin currents may induce the flow of information in carbon-based materials without any charge current being present. The impact: significant contributions to carbon-based spintronics (a new type of energy-efficient electronics).

When studying graphene, a material often hailed as the new silicon of the 21st century, his group has:  

  1. developed a simple way to account for the disordered environment that exists in any realistic low-dimensional system.The Impact: computational predictions become more realistic.
  2. derived a mathematically transparent expression for the single-particle Green function of graphene, a quantity that was only calculated either numerically or by imposing some drastic approximations. Their approach is simple and yet describes the electronic structure of graphene with great accuracy. The impact: improves the mathematical description of a material that has outstanding potential for numerous technological applications.
  3. shown that the vast majority of computational calculations for magnetically doped graphene-like structures suffer from a fundamental flaw that is based on the symmetry of the graphene lattice. His group has identified several problems in the literature and pointed out the corrections that are needed. The impact: researchers are now following their advice on how to perform these calculations correctly. This shows clear leadership in guiding the wider community working on computational calculations with graphene.
  4.  investigated the transport properties of wire networks, with the intention of building flexible displays that outperform the current state-of-the-art materials used for this function. One of their papers on this topic has been listed in Nature Nanotechnology, on why “Nanotube networks may be reaching the limits of their conductivity”. The impact: valuable guidelines on the search for flexible electronic displays.

At the time of writing, Professor Ferreira has 62 articles in high impact-factor peer-reviewed journals (excluding conference proceedings); 853 citations; and a Hirsch-factor of 16; Hirsch himself reports that an index of h~12 corresponds to the threshold of advancement to Associate Professorship in US Universities (see J.E Hirsch, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102, 16569 (2005)). His current average productivity is of 6 papers in high impact-factor journals per year. He is also a contributor to the AMBER project of CRANN.

To date, as a Principal Investigator (PI) his research funding totals €3.39m and as co-PI totals €120k. His overall research funding totals € 3.5m.

Professor Ferreira is an Associate Investigator of CRANN. He is a member of the American Physical Society (APS), of the Institute of Physics (IOP) and of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). He is referee of numerous Scientific Journals.

Professor Ferreira has one patent “Materials with tunable properties and devices and methods of making same using random nanowire or nanotube networks”, European Patent Office,  Patent No. 12166844.6-2210, 20/July/2012. He has been invited to give presentations at numerous Universities and Research Centres throughout the world, including MIT, the University of Florida and the University of Pennsylvania, to name but a few. In addition, he has delivered many seminars at several other Universities worldwide and given many presentations, some of which invited, at Conferences and Workshops.

Professor Ferreira was visiting Professor at Boston University (2010). He was nominated for the “Excellence in Teaching” Award of Trinity in 2011, now deferred to 2012.

He teaches a total of 106 hours at undergraduate level: Physics of Motion (18); Quantum Mechanics (32); Introduction to Green Functions in Physics (12); Small Group tutorials (22); Final-Year Project supervision (22). At postgraduate level he teaches a total of 20 hours: Solid State Physics (5); Postgraduate seminar series (15). His total of 126 hours per year is above the average load in the School of Physics.

He has supervised 4 PhDs to completion and is currently supervising 4 PhDs and 4 Postdocs.

Some of his innovative approaches to teaching include End-of-Lecture Challenges; Fermi questions section of the small group tutorials; Physics and real-life problems; Experimental approach to the Senior Freshman Research Projects. He has designed curricula or new modules for Physics of Sports (5 lectures); Introduction to Green functions in Physics (12 lectures); Quantum Mechanics (32 lectures).

Professor Ferreira has been Director of Postgraduate Teaching and Learning since 2010. He has been a Member of the Executive Committee of the School of Physics since 2010. He has been a member of the Graduate Studies Committee since 2010. He was responsible for the School at College Open Days from 2005-2009. He acted as School Recruitment and Outreach Coordinator from 2005-2009 and  International Students Coordinator from 2002-2005.

Professor Ferreira represented Trinity in recruitment fairs in South America (2012). He has an outstanding track-record in recruiting South-American students to Trinity. He is the Trinity contact-person for the Science Without Borders Programme (2012) and is PI for the International Strategic Cooperation Awards (ISCA) (2012).

He is the PI responsible for the Dublin Graduate Physics Programme (DGPP); a member of the organising committee of the International Conference on Science and Technology of Synthetic Metals 2006 (1000 participants); a member of the organising committee of the Joint European Magnetic Symposia 2008 (450 participants); and a member of the NANOTP International network;

Professor Ferreira was editor of Folhetim (Journal for Popularization of Science) (1998-2002); co-creator of the Transition Year Physics Experience (TYPE) Programme; recipient of the Secondary Teacher Assistant Researcher (STAR) award (2007); and part of parental support for Science at Castleknock Community College (2012).

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Neil Frankish

neil-frankishProfessor Neil H Frankish PhD (Strathclyde), MA (TCD) and BSc (Sunderland) joined Trinity College in 1980. He teaches undergraduate pharmacy students Antimicrobial Therapy, Cardiovascular Pharmacology, Veterinary Pharmacy and Iatrogenic Disease. He also teaches MSc postgraduate courses in Pharmaceutical Technology, Hospital Pharmacy, Community Pharmacy and Development Practice. He has supervised 8 post-graduate research students, 10 post-doctoral researchers and currently has 1 student undertaking research. He pioneered the use of Computer-Aided Learning (CAL) within the School of Pharmacy, initially writing the software himself before introducing commercial CAL software.

He was very much involved in designing and developing the curriculum in the discipline of pharmacology for the Pharmacy degree as well as the course in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Technology, the latter course designed to fill the need of the multinational pharmaceutical companies in Ireland.

His major research theme, which has spanned a period of 18 years, is the development of a novel drug (PH46A) for the treatment of ulcerative colitis (UC). This potential new class of drugs was discovered by Professor Frankish and a colleague at Trinity College. The disease causes bloody diarrhoea, impaired quality of life, unpredictable risk of incontinence and work absenteeism. Patients with UC can often have their symptoms suppressed with salicylate drugs but steroids are often required to treat flare-ups and are often the last barrier to surgical removal of the colon, which results in a reduced quality of life. Patients would often prefer to avoid steroids with their attendant side effects of thinning of bones and skin, immune suppression and other changes. They have already shown that PH46A profoundly alters the course of the disease in preclinical animal models of the disease. His future research will be to determine whether PH46A is a safe and effective medicine for treating patients with UC. Clinical trials on PH46A are planned for 2013.

He has 33 peer reviewed articles, 2 book chapters, 4 granted patents, 4 patents pending, 149 citations, and a H index of 8. He is in receipt of research funding in excess of €6m, largely from international, non-exchequer sources. He is a member of the British Pharmacological Society.

He is currently Managing Director and co‐founder of Trino Therapeutics Ltd. (www.trinotherapeutics.com), a drug discovery and early development company based at the Trinity Enterprise Centre in Dublin. It is currently supported by the Wellcome Trust and venture capital companies including Fountain Healthcare and Enterprise Ireland. The company was formerly known as Pharmatrin Ltd. They have 2 full-time employees in addition to the founders, but also employ the services of research support companies and consultants from Ireland and overseas.

Professor Frankish is the joint author of 4 full granted patents, together with 4 new patent applications, this intellectual Property being the major asset of Trino Therapeutics. He has been collaborating with the IPU in respect of the provision of professional information to pharmacists in Ireland. He has been instrumental in developing the software and in compiling the databases in the areas of drug interactions and drugs use during pregnancy and breastfeeding. This software and database package is used extensively by both pharmacists and general medical practitioners nationwide. The databases are an invaluable resource for healthcare professionals in Ireland, being fully tailored to the Irish environment.

He is also involved in a collaborative project with the Pharmacy of the Rotunda Hospital that involves using software applications to facilitate current pharmacy management practices. He has been invited to industry consultation on proposed national policy changes in the management and commercialisation of IP arising from publicly funded research, and to the IP Implementation Group (IPIG) and the IP Policy Group (IPPG), established by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. He has also been invited to share biotech entrepreneur expertise for discussions on policy in respect to translational funding in the life sciences with the Board of Enterprise Ireland (EI) in 2005 and for EI consultations on Future demand of laboratory space for indigenous Irish companies in 2008. He represented the Irish Biotechnology industry through EI at landmark life science entrepreneur events both nationally and internationally at BioIreland 2007, and EI US BioMission 2004. He was invited speaker on IBD at the BioIreland 2006 Conference and panellist on biotech funding discussion.

Professor Frankish has served on numerous College committees, including Bioresources Committee, Information Services User Group and Safety Committee.

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David Hevey

david-heveyAfter graduating top in class and with 1st class honours degrees in both his undergraduate (BA Psychology (Hons), UCD 1994) and postgraduate (MA Applied Psychology, UCD, 1995) studies, Professor David Hevey completed his HRB-funded PhD in Trinity College Dublin (1999). After working in Beaumont Hospital and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, he joined the School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin in February 2002.

He is solely responsible for the design and delivery of his undergraduate and postgraduate modules.  In a typical academic year he teaches from the start of September to the start of August on the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology programme, which is a 3-year taught professional doctorate.  He delivers modules on Statistics and Methodology to the students throughout their professional training.  He also teaches a module on Clinical Health Psychology to students in their 3rd year.  In addition he teaches a Research Methods and Statistics module for students on the Doctorate in Counselling Psychology, and a module in Applied Health Psychology to students completing the MSc Applied Psychology. He teaches Sophister undergraduate modules on Health Psychology and Research Methods and Statistics.

Professor Hevey’s research-led approach to teaching Health Psychology provides students with a critical understanding of contemporary developments in the discipline.  A scientist-practitioner model is espoused wherein the practice of health psychologists is based on the scientific knowledgebase of psychology.

A problem-based learning approach informs his approach to teaching Statistics and Methodology.  In addition to being active producers of research, psychologists must be informed consumers of the research literature.  A critical orientation towards research appraisal is a central theme throughout all such teaching. 

In the past decade, he has successfully supervised 34 doctoral level students (3 PhDs and 31 taught doctorates). He currently supervises 4 PhD students, 1 MSc student and 5 taught doctoral students. Consequently he helps maintain the College’s reputation for providing high quality graduate education for both taught and research students. In addition to externally examining a number of PhD theses, he was an External Examiner to the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology Programme at Queens University Belfast (2007 –2011).

His internationally-recognised research programme focuses on the application of psychology to healthcare in two main areas: (i) how to enhance Quality of Life (QOL) and adjustment for people with chronic illness, and (ii) how people understand information regarding their level of risk for developing specific illnesses.  His research receives significant grant awards (eg over €750k in the past 5 years) and is consistently published in the best international journals.  He has 54 articles published or in press in peer-reviewed journals and 7 book chapters.  His h-index is 12.  To date he has received €1.92m in research funding, of which €620k has been as the Principal Investigator and €1.3m has been as a Co-investigator. His research has won prizes at both national (Psychological Society of Ireland) and international (European Society of Cardiology) scientific conferences.

Based on his research success, he is the inaugural Director of the Research Centre for Psychological Health based in the School of Psychology. The centre addresses important social issues by focussing research on applications of psychological science to enhance mental health and well-being, and it provides leadership in the area of applied psychology for the College.

Professor Hevey has been a college tutor for 5 years and was Director of Postgraduate Learning and Teaching (responsible for postgraduate research students) in the School.  He is a member of the School’s Research Committee, which implements the School’s research strategy. He was previously a member of School’s Ethics and Postgraduate committees for 3 years.

He contributes significantly to the discipline of psychology at both a national and international level. He is on the Advisory Committee for the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations’ (EFPA) Congress on Psychology for Health, which formulates recommendations for European healthcare policies. He was voted by the membership of the society onto the European Health Psychology Society (EHPS) executive committee (2006-09), who organises the largest annual Health Psychology conference in Europe.  He was Education and Training officer, responsible for organising international workshops, awarding grants, and reviewing European training programmes.

Professor Hevey is on the PSI Expert Validation Committee (EVC), which determines the eligibility of professional psychologists to work for the HSE in Ireland. He is the Chair of the PSI EuroPsy Award committee, which determines Irish applicant’s eligibility to be on the Register of European Psychologists. He is a member of the PSI Accreditation Quality Assurance Group that developed the national Health Psychology postgraduate training guidelines. He was a founding member, and current secretary, of the PSI Division of Teachers and Researchers, which promotes best practice in teaching and research.

He was responsible for developing national guidelines for Cardiac Rehabilitation service delivery, and for both national and European guidelines on Cardiac Rehabilitation service audit.

Engagement with society is a core aspect of his academic activities. He is one of the initial members of the Trinity Knowledge Shop pilot scheme, which is a novel college initiative to facilitate research for community organisations with the aim of fostering longer term mutually beneficial relationships. Such outreach activities are congruent with his focus on applications of psychology to important social issues and the College’s emphasis on outreach activities.

Through his work (1 day per week) with the Health Service Executive he directs and supervises service-based internal reports for Psychology services in the Eastern region. These reports focus on evaluating services and inform service planning and development.  This work contributes to enhanced service-delivery for clinical populations.

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Daniel Kelly

daniel-kellyProfessor Daniel Kelly, BA, BAI, MSc, PhD graduated with a 1st class honours degree in Mechanical Engineering from Trinity College Dublin in 1999. He was awarded his MSc from Trinity in 2002 for a thesis entitled “A study of middle ear biomechanics using the finite element method”. Part of this work was awarded the Norman Gamble Prize in Otology from the Royal Society of Medicine (UK) in 2002. He was awarded his PhD in 2004, also from Trinity, for a thesis entitled “Mechano-regulation of tissue differentiation in osteochondral detects”. On completing his PhD, Professor Kelly worked firstly as a research and development engineer in the medical device industry, joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering in Trinity as a faculty member in 2005. From 2009-2010 he worked as a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Biomedical Engineering in Columbia University, New York. In 2010 he was made a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

Professor Kelly currently teaches at both an undergraduate and postgraduate level. At an undergraduate level he primarily teaches Mechanics of Solids and Biomechanics, while at a postgraduate level he teaches on the MSc in Bioengineering programme. He is currently supervising 9 PhD students. To date, he has supervised 5 PhD students, 2 Research Masters students and 13 Taught Masters students to completion. During his time in Trinity, he has developed 2 new undergraduate modules, Introduction to Bioengineering and Biomechanics of Tissues and Implants. In his previous role as the deputy director for undergraduate teaching in the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, he played a key role in coordinating a proposal for the development of an undergraduate stream in Biomedical Engineering to be delivered as part of the current engineering degree. The first intake of 25 students into this stream begins in the 2012/2013 academic year.

The goal of Professor Kelly’s lab is to understand how environmental factors, in particular mechanical loading, regulate the fate of adult stem cells. This research underpins a more translational programme aimed at developing novel mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) based therapies to regenerate damaged and diseased orthopaedic tissues such as articular cartilage and bone. Research in this area will hopefully lead to an efficacious therapy to either prevent or treat osteoarthritis, a disease affecting over 1 in 5 people.  This is considered to be one of the greatest challenges in the field of orthopaedic medicine. In total, Professor Kelly has authored or co-authored 66 peer reviewed journal papers (with ~1000 citations), 8 book chapters, 73 international and 58 national conference papers or abstracts. His h-index is 19. These include papers in the leading journals in the field, including e Cells and Materials, Tissue Engineering, Acta Biomaterialia, Journal of the Royal Society Interface and PloS One. He is an inventor on 2 patent applications. His lab was recently the recipient of the 2012 Perren Award from the European Society of Biomechanics for best scientific paper in this field. In total Profesor Kelly has secured over €4m (Trinity contribution) in funding as a Principal Investigator. In 2008 he was the sole recipient of Science Foundation Ireland’s President of Ireland Young Researcher Award (PIYRA).  The PIYRA is Science Foundation Ireland’s most prestigious award. Established in 2004, the goal of the PIYRA is to attract the world’s leading early stage researchers to Ireland to establish their laboratories. In 2010 he was awarded a European Research Council starter grant of €1.5m to develop novel stem cell based therapies to regenerate damaged articular cartilage. These awards are only given to 300 of the top scientists and engineers across Europe each year, less than 10% of those who apply.

Professor Kelly is currently the Director of the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering (TCBE). The Centre brings together over 100 researchers, including 18 Principal Investigators, from diverse academic backgrounds to tackle problems at the interface of Engineering, Biology and Medicine. He was previously the deputy director for undergraduate teaching for the TCBE. He also sits on the Bioresources Management Committee, the executive committee of CRANN and the Strategic Management Group of the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute.

Professor Kelly has also strongly engaged with his discipline and society at large. He has been invited to present his research at 16 different institutes or conferences worldwide. He is part of a consortium of researchers working on novel treatments for healing large bone defects which is funded by the AO Foundation in Switzerland.  He is a member of the COST Trans-Domain Proposals Standing Assessment Board. COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is one of the longest-running European instruments supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe. He is also a grant reviewer for a number of national and international funding agencies including the European Research Council, Orthopaedic Research UK and Enterprise Ireland. Professor Kelly is also a member of the International Editorial Review Board for the leading journal e Cells and Materials. He has also acted as an ad-hoc reviewer for over 30 different journals. In the past, Professor Kelly has worked as a consultant to a number of Medical Device companies and related organizations. Research from his lab has also lead to the development of a novel stent which has been patented and licensed to a start-up company (Synergy Flow). He is organising and will chair the 19th Annual Conference of the Bioengineering Section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland in January 2013.

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Jarlath Killeen

jarlath-killeenJarlath Killeen was award a PhD degree in Irish Writing in 2001 from UCD, and graduated with a 1st class honours BA in English and History in 1998 from Trinity College Dublin. He joined Trinity in January 2006.

Professor Killeen teaches across the range of students from Freshman to postgraduate, and in a variety of formats; lecture, tutorial, seminar, one-on-one doctoral supervision. He co-ordinates 2 Freshman modules (student numbers up to 160, each involving lecturing 1x12 hours, and tutorials, 2x7 hours); 1 year-long module and also a 1 semester module at sophister level (with between 20-30 students in each module, 2x24 hours for the year long module, 2x12 hours for the one semester module), and gives lectures on a range of other undergraduate modules. He co-ordinates and teaches an option on ‘The Victorian Child’ in both the MPhil in Popular Literature and the new MPhil in Children’s Literature (student numbers between 15-25, 2x12 hours), and is part of a small team that designs and teaches the core course for the MPhil in Popular Literature. He usually supervises between 5 to 8 M Phil students during the writing of their dissertations each year. He is responsible for assessment for all students in modules that he co-ordinates, and also has some assessment duties for a range of other modules. This includes second marking at both sophister and postgraduate level. He has supervised 3 PhD students to completion and currently supervises 7 PhD students.

All the modules that he now co-ordinates have been designed by him, and are new. He has completed 3 years as a tutor at Trinity College.

His doctoral thesis ‘Religion, the Nation and Oscar Wilde’, the subsequent book (The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde [Ashgate, 2007]), and the complementary study The Faiths of Oscar Wilde (Palgrave, 2005), all concentrated on the relationship between religious controversy, theology, and aesthetics in the writings of Oscar Wilde. He argued that while much excellent critical work had been conducted on Wilde in the hundred years since his death, the ambiguous nature of religious belief in his writings remained a problem. In relating the Irish Catholicism Wilde encountered in the West of Ireland as a child, to that he experienced in Oxford as an undergraduate, Professor Killeen’s studies suggested that a Catholic paradigm be applied to Wilde’s entire oeuvre, enabling his work to be read as genuinely post-colonial and theologically radical. Reviews of his work on Wilde have repeatedly pointed out that it should transform our understanding of Wilde’s personal beliefs and how his religious faith impacted on his writing, or, as Benjamin Fisher put it in a review, his research will ‘doubtless occasion revaluations of Wilde's writings, likewise elicit challenges from minimizers of Wilde's Roman Catholic heritage’. His work has been cited in a number of publications, including the Dictionary of National Biography, and a major recent study by Anne Markey of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales (Irish Academic Press, 2011), accepted that his study of Wilde’s fairy tales was the most important to date, and engaged with this work extensively. His work on Wilde prompted Irish Academic Press to ask him to edit a collection of original articles on him as part of the important series Irish Writers in Their Time (published 2010), and Cambridge University Press engaged him to write an article on ‘Oscar Wilde and the Oral Tradition’ for its new Companion to Oscar Wilde (forthcoming 2012).

His study of Anglican culture in Ireland from 1641 to the end of the 18th century, Gothic Ireland, was published by Four Courts Press in October 2005. It argued that the Gothic form infiltrated Anglican literary culture in Ireland during the eighteenth century as the dominant methodology to express the peculiarities of a hybrid identity, and examined a number of key Irish Anglican writers and thinkers: John Temple, William Molyneux, William King, Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke and Maria Edgeworth. Different reviewers have commended the study as “A fascinating and provocative new account of the ‘rise of the Gothic’ in Ireland”, “a scholarly work that will inevitably spark debate as to the origins of the Gothic”, and a work which demonstrates “a mastery of Irish history and literature and of the most recent criticism of Gothic literature and of the writers covered in order to locate and present a novel approach to the subject.” This book, together with more recent articles theorising and exploring the still-emerging field of Irish Gothic, have made him a leading figure in the ‘Irish Gothic’ scholarly community. His article ‘Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction’ (2006) has been important in the development of this field and is cited by a number of recent studies, provoked a number of responses, and sparked a journal debate with Professor Richard Haslam on the nature of the Irish Gothic. Following on from this article he has been asked to contribute to a number of new scholarly publications interrogating Irish Gothic writing, including the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gothic under the general editorship of David Punter, a collection of articles examining the life and writing of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (Hippocampus Press, 2011 – a book nominated for the Stoker award, a major prize in the Gothic field) and a new edition of Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ with interpretive essays to be published by the University of Wisconsin Press later this year. He complemented this focus on Ireland with his most recent publication, a study of nineteenth-century British Gothic for the new four volume ‘History of the Gothic’ published by the University of Wales Press. Gothic
Literature, 1825-1914 (July 2009), is a detailed and accessible study of Gothic literature in the nineteenth century, looking in particular at how the Gothic attempted to resolve the psychological and theological problems thrown up by the modernisation and secularisation of British society.

Professor Killeen has a total number of 23 peer reviewed publications. He has received total research funding of €3,800 for a major conference on the life and works of Bram Stoker, held in the Long Room Hub in July 2012.

He began serving as a College Tutor in 2009. He was Head of the Junior Freshman year from 2008 to 2012. This is an important position, with two major components. The first is procedural, with the Head advising on procedures in the School, keeping records of attendance, and liaising with tutorial teachers with specific issues. The Head also deals in a very direct way with the first year students, advising on progress, dealing with extension requests, helping with their difficulties and where necessary, liaising with college tutors in a confidential way. He has been Disabilities Officer since 2008 and TAP Liaison Officer since 2008. Again, these are key positions in ensuring equality of access. He was on the Mature Student Assessment Panel from 2007 to 2010. On 3 occasions he has served on the School’s mature student assessment panel. He was Director of M Phil in Popular Literature in 2011. He has just taken over the role of Director of Teaching and Learning (Undergraduate) in 2012.

He is manuscript reader for leading academic presses (Manchester, Irish Academic, Palgrave Macmillan, University of Wales) and Journals (Oxford journals, Irish University Review). He is a member of the  editorial board for the online Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.

He has been invited on many occasions to give lectures and participate in academic panels; last year, he was invited as a plenary speaker in the major conference organised by the International Colloquium on Gothic Literature, held in Mexico City.

He has also worked on a HETAC panel for the validation of American College Dublin’s BA degree programme.  He has worked on the Consultative Panel of FuturesIreland, organised by the National Economic and Social Development Office (NESDO) and the Department of the Taoiseach. This committee was given the remit of evaluating Ireland’s future and identifying ways in which the nation’s cultural, social and economic potential might be realised, with specific reference to innovation.

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Ed Lavelle

ed-lavelleProfessor Ed C Lavelle graduated with a PhD in Immunology from the University of Plymouth, England, in 1994 and a BSc (1st class honours) in Microbiology from University College Galway in 1990. He joined Trinity College Dublin as a lecturer in Immunology in 2004 and was elected to Fellowship at Trinity in 2012.

Professor Lavelle has been course coordinator for the BA (Mod) in Biochemistry with Immunology since 2006. He has designed 5 lecture and practical courses. He has brought 4 PhD students to completion and is currently supervisor of  7 PhD students. He designed the curriculum for the Senior Sophister year of the new degree in Immunology and is responsible for drafting Senior Sophister exam papers, liaising with external examiners, dealing with student queries and providing references. He has been the external examiner for 5 PhD candidates and 1 MPhil candidate and internal examiner for 9 PhD candidates. He was involved in setting up a new system for teaching quantitative problems and drafting the 10 core principles of Immunology to inform the teaching of Immunology. He was invited to lecture to final year pharmacy students on Vaccine adjuvants on behalf of the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHS) at RCSI in 2011 and 2012. He was invited lecturer on a postgraduate course on "Vaccine Immunology with Exploration of Immune Response to Mucosal Vaccines" in 2012, University of Coimbra, Portugal.

Professor Lavelle’s research is focused on vaccine adjuvants. These substances activate the immune system and are essential for vaccines to induce protective immune responses.  There is a particular need for new and more effective vaccines for diseases including HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.  In addition there is a need for improved oral rather than injectable vaccines for diseases which affect the gastrointestinal tract such as cholera and Travvelers diarrhoea. With his collaborators, he is working to develop enhanced vaccines for both injection and oral delivery.  A second major focus is to understand how the adjuvants in vaccines that they currently use activate the immune system and their limitations.  If their mode of action can be understood, this information can be exploited to develop more effective and safer vaccines. The work is highly indisciplinary, involving a number of academics in different Schools across the college, in addition to other Irish and international academics and companies. 

Professor Lavelle has a h-index of 30 and 2,978 citations. He has published 63 papers in international peer reviewed journals and 7 book chapters. He has been invited to speak at 44 international and national meetings and seminars. He has attracted €3.45m in grant income from 21 grants from grant agencies and companies including 17 as Principal Investigator. He is a member of the European Mucosal Immunology group, Society for Mucosal Immunology, and Irish Society for Immunology.

He was Director of Research at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology from 2009 to 2012. He is a member of the School Curriculum committee. This involves responsibility for the degree programme structure and curriculum and for establishing and reviewing exam structure and regulations. He is also a member of the School executive and has been on interview panels for lectureships in the Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine. He has represented the School at research committee meetings, organised the Biochemical society and its seminar programme, arranged seminars for visiting companies, attended an EU meeting on Horizon 2020 funding in Brussels and engaged with visiting representatives from other institutions (e.g. Fiocruz, University of Louvain, Bangalore) regarding establishing research links with Trinity.
He contributed to the Trinity Access Programme (TAP) Maths and Science scholars programme and participated in transition year programmes run through the School and through CRANN. He represented Trinity at the college open day and the faculty at the Higher Options event in the RDS for secondary school students considering their choice of degree courses.

Professor Lavelle is organiser of the 2012 European Mucosal Immunology Group meeting to be held in Dublin in October 2012 (http://www.emig2012.com). This is the first time the meeting has been brought to Ireland. He has been a member of the scientific advisory board for 8 international conferences. He has chaired sessions at many international meetings on mucosal immunology and vaccines. He is Associate Editor for Frontiers in Mucosal Immunology (2010-2012).

He is a member of the Editorial board for Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents (1997-2008) and ofnetworks of collaborators across the EU and the US and is a member of consortia on vaccine research (TRANSVAC, Helicovaxor, ADITEC). He is reviewer of grant applications for many agencies including the Gates Foundation and the European Union and peer reviewer of papers for the leading Immunology and vaccine journals. His research has been reported on widely by the national and international media including The Irish Times and The Daily Mail. He has collaborated closely with the Irish SMEs, Sigmoid Pharma and Merrion Biopharma and with a number of multinationals including Novartis Vaccines. He is the named inventor on 5 patents and patent applications.

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Gary Moran

gary-moranProfessor Gary Moran has been a lecturer in the School of Dental Science since 2002. He studied microbiology at undergraduate level in Trinity before completing his PhD studies in the laboratory of Professor David Coleman in the School of Dental Science on the molecular biology of antifungal drug resistance in pathogenic yeast. He continued his research as a post-doctoral research fellow for 4 years before being appointed a lecturer in Microbiology in the School of Dental Science and the Dublin Dental University Hospital (DDUH) in 2002. During this time, he also trained under international experts in the emerging areas of functional genomics in laboratories in Lausanne as an EMBO fellow and at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin.

Professor Moran is strongly committed to and plays a major role in undergraduate teaching in the School of Dental Science. His primary role is to train Dental Science students in the fundamentals of biology and chemistry and he is a strong proponent of problem based learning (PBL) for this purpose. Through PBL, Professor Moran encourages students to communicate and engage in critical thinking, essential skills for modern healthcare professionals. He also designs and delivers an advanced module for Dental Science students undertaking the Foundation Scholarship exams in Trinity and a laboratory course in microbiology. His teaching role also extends to supervision of student research projects in the Oral Biosciences laboratory of the DDUH. This includes projects for Dental Science undergraduate students, introducing them to research for this first time and more advanced projects for postgraduate students studying for the degree of PhD by research. Professor Moran has supervised 6 successful PhDs since 2002 and currently has 3 other PhD students near completion. Professor Moran is also committed to helping undergraduate students in their day-to-day travails, having acted as a personal tutor to hundreds of Trinity students since 2007.

Professor Moran has also devoted his career to understanding the biology of microorganisms responsible for oral disease in humans, especially the fungal pathogen Candida albicans. From early in his career, Professor Moran was at the forefront of genomic analyses in this organism and carried out the first genome-wide comparative genomic analysis in Candida species, studies which in 2009 led to the publication of the Candida dubliniensis genome sequence, which was viewed as a significant advancement in our understanding of the evolution of fungal pathogens. Currently, investigators in his laboratory are exploiting these genome-wide analyses to understand the roles of newly identified virulence genes in fungal disease. This research programme is highly international, with collaborators in London, Aberdeen, Germany and the USA. Professor Moran has published 44 research articles in peer reviewed international journals and published 6 book chapters on the subject. These articles have been cited over 1,600 times by colleagues in the field. Over the last 10 years he has been awarded over €1.6m (from the Health Research Board and Science Foundation Ireland) in research grants to carry out this work. More recently, he has diversified his research interests having initiated new programmes of research on the oral bacteria responsible for periodontal disease and is involved in characterising bacterial proteins that could be developed for use in vaccines.

Professor Moran is an active member of many international professional organisations including the American Society for Microbiology, the International Association for Dental Research and the Society for General Microbiology. He was the annual conference secretary for the British Society for Medical Mycology (2007-2010) and is a founder member of 2 local organisations that promote microbial science, the Irish Fungal Society and the Dublin Academy of Pathogenomics and Infection Biology (DAPI).

As Director of Research for the School of Dental Science (2012), he is now committed to developing the research strategy of the school and maintaining the reputation of the school as the leading research centre for oral biology in Ireland. One of his main priorities is to increase the profile of the school’s research both externally and internally among staff and students. Establishing the school as a world-class centre for Dental research is essential for improving the international reputation and teaching excellence within the school.

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Derek Nolan

derek-nolanProfessor Derek Nolan has always been fascinated by science and was certain from an early stage that he wanted to pursue a career in research and teaching.  As an undergraduate at Trinity taking Natural Sciences the attractions of biology at a molecular level proved irresistible and the choice of Biochemistry as a degree subject was an obvious one for him. After graduating with 1st class honours he proceeded to PhD research in Paul Voorheis’ laboratory at the Department of Biochemistry, where his interest in African trypanosomes began. This interest continued at postdoctoral level when, following the award of a long-term fellowship from EMBO, he moved to Etienne Pays’ group (ULB, Brussels) to investigate surface proteins in trypanosomes (1992). Subsequently, through Marie Curie (1994) and PIA Belgium (1996) personal fellowships he continued to work on the cell biology and biochemistry of trypanosome at the ULB in Brussels. Following the award of a prestigious Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship he returned to Trinity (2002) to establish an independent research focused on providing a better understanding of how these parasites survive in their mammalian hosts in order to develop new, improved therapies against African trypanosomes.

During the past 10 years at Trinity he believes that he has addressed questions of major interest in the field and has established strong collaborations and links with other research groups throughout the UK, Europe and the USA.  This research has been supported by funding from both national and international agencies (~ €2.5m to date) and has led to several important discoveries and insights, which have been published in journals of the highest impact, such as Nature, Science, Cell and the EMBO J.  In total he has published 37 papers in peer reviewed journals with an average citation of 34.5 per paper. These research outputs have contributed to the high standing of the molecular parasitology group at Trinity in the field. In collaboration with colleagues in Belgium, I have made important contributions to understanding how trypanosomes in East Africa overcome the serum factor responsible for human innate immunity and in doing so go on to cause human sleeping sickness.  In addition, discoveries at Trinity have led to a deeper understanding of how these parasites acquire essential growth factors from the bloodstream of their host. These advances are providing directions for new therapeutic approaches for human and animal trypanosomiasis.

Professor Nolan continues to be motivated by the fact that these parasites cause fatal sleeping sickness in humans and remain a major health problem in 35 of the poorest countries in the world. This is not a disease of wealthy countries and has been neglected by the pharmaceutical industry and research agencies in the developed world. The drugs currently employed to treat infections are old, toxic and resistance to two has emerged. Moreover, the drug of choice is suitable only in early stages of the infection when diagnosis is difficult, so there is an urgent need to develop new therapies. Spread by the tsetse flies trypanosomes are also a major constraint to livestock productivity throughout sub-Saharan Africa with costs up to $5-8 billion annually. Quite properly these parasites are recognised as a global health issue by the World Health Organization and have been specifically targeted as neglected disease.  Of course trypanosomes are also of great intrinsic scientific interest in their own right! Frequently they contravene established paradigms in biochemistry and cell biology and thus reveal new insights and highlight the wonderful biological diversity that exists at the molecular level.

In parallel with his research activities he has been actively involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and has contributed to many teaching modules by developing new lecture courses and practical classes inspired by a commitment to research led teaching. Appointed as a lecturer in 2007, last year he had one of the highest number of time-tabled student contact hours per year in the school of biochemistry and immunology (144 hours) reflecting his extensive teaching commitments at senior freshman, junior and senior sophister level. As an educator at university level he believes it is essential to inspire and motivate students to develop their capacity to problem solve, to encourage them to ask questions, to develop a passion for discovery, to be able to understand the “causes of things”.

He uses a range of technologies and teaching formats to encourage student interaction and to avoid passive learning. Especially useful is the use of videos and material arising from his own laboratory and their incorporation into lectures to link teaching to research questions. All of this material along with interactive Q&A sessions related to the courses is placed within a virtual learning environment where they can be accessed at any time. These approaches are especially useful for practical classes, for example in the SF BY2203 module (he designed the content and narrative for the video) where it has led to a major improvement in the student grades. He is currently the JS co-ordinator for the Biochemistry with Cell biology degree course and has administrative responsibility for this cohort. As a member of the school curriculum committee since 2006 he has made significant input into course content, examination and development of school policy for undergraduate education. During the past 2 years he was heavily involved in merging the existing cell biology and structural biology degree courses to create the new Biochemistry degree course. He is now the JS co-ordinator for this degree and is module co-ordinator for elements of several of other degree courses offered by the school.

He is also actively involved in postgraduate education. He has successfully supervised 3 PhD students and currently has 2 PhD students in his group. He has also co-supervised 2 students with other colleagues acting as principle investigator. At Masters level he has supervised several MSc students as part of the NUI maynooth MSc in immunology and global health and is a co-ordinator for the parasitology module of the new MSc in Immunology run by the school of Biochemistry and Immunology.

As a parasitologist he is very interested in the application and development of microscopy and cell imaging and is responsible for the confocal facility in my school. In this capacity he has contributed to developing imaging within the school by advising researchers on fluorescence microscopy, developing a cell imaging course of lectures and by sourcing funds (so far ~ €600K) for the instruments for live cell work. In addition, as Director of Trinity’s Centre for Microscopy and Analysis (CMA) he has overall responsibility for strategic, administrative, financial, and HR issues for the centre and for the provision of imaging and analytical services for college users. Here his focus has been to use the commercial income of CMA to develop resources to facilitate teaching and research throughout college. He  has led an initiative, in collaboration with the Trinity Biomedical sciences Institute (TBSI), that will deliver a facility at TBSI specifically for electron microscopy of biological samples (through the CMA funded purchase of a dedicated TEM and cryo-ultramicotome).  This facility will allow researchers to image cells and organelles at the ultra-structural level using antibodies and other markers and to visualize these structures in three dimensions.

Since July 2009 he has served on the school executive as Director of Teaching and Learning (Post Graduate). As a member of the executive he has been involved in preparation of the school strategic plan and for school review in 2011. As DTLPG he is responsible for student admission, monitoring of progress through the confirmation process, and the organisation, chairing and administration of viva voce examination for PhD candidates. As school DTLPG he attends and reports back on the monthly meeting of the Graduate Studies Committee and is currently serving on the small working group chaired by the Dean of Graduate Studies to develop a document on research supervision and role of the supervisor of research students. As DTLPG he has contributed to the development of new MSc in immunology degree course to be run by the School of Biochemistry and Immunology. In order to encourage and support PhD students in the school he has recently secured sponsorship for a medal for postgraduate research. To be called the “Keith Tipton Medal for Postgraduate Research” this medal will be awarded annually at a ceremony to the most promising PhD student who completes their PhD conformation within the required period. 

His laboratory takes part in the school programme for transition year students from which a student spends a week working in the laboratory on a work experience project. He is a member of the SFI outreach panel for schools and also for an Irish Aid funded programme run by the global health MSc course at NUI Maynooth (by Dr Noel Murphy). He regularly gives presentations to secondary schools in Dublin, usually transition year students, to describe his research on African trypanosomes and the relevance of the work to global health and poverty in Africa.

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Lorraine O'Driscoll

lorraine-odriscollLorraine O’Driscoll holds a BSc (Hon) in Pharmacology (awarded from NUI); an MSc(Res) in Clinical Pharmacology through collaborative studies involving the National Maternity Hospital UCD, McMaster University, Canada (awarded from NUI); and a PhD in Biotechnology (awarded from DCU). In 2008, Lorraine joined the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences as a lecturer in Pharmacology, where she has been appointed as Director of Research. In 2012, Lorraine was elected to Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin.

Upon completing her PhD (1995), Lorraine worked on biotechnology and biomedical research studies for industry (including MedaNova Ltd; Medi-Syn; Berlex, San Francisco; Archport Ltd./Diosynth, The Netherlands) before returning (2001) to academic research and teaching. Immediately prior to joining Trinity, Lorraine lectured in the School of Biotechnology, DCU and held a Senior Research Programme Leader position at the NICB, DCU. There she led a cancer research group and taught on specialised biotechnology courses for industry and academia (including the IDA, Wyeth, Elan, Roche, ICORG, FEBS).

In her current position, Lorraine co-ordinates 5 teaching modules and contributes to 11 others. The latter include cooperative courses with UCD, DCU and St. James’s hospital. Co-ordinating each module involves its design and development of its contents, coordinating and delivering lectures and tutorials, its examinations/assessments and subsequent results. The role of the Pharmacist is evolving from the traditional dispenser of drugs in a community or hospital pharmacy, to being a more active member of a patient’s management team. Furthermore, an increasing number of Pharmacists are choosing a career in the pharmaceutical/bio-pharma industry. So, to ensure the practical relevance of material taught is clear, Lorraine includes relevant Guest Speakers (eg Endocrinologists; Oncologists; etc) in her modules. She also trains her students at the National Institute for Bio-processing Research and Training(NIBRT). The BSc (Pharm) degree in Ireland is now evolving to a 5-year Integrated MSc(Pharm) course. Lorraine is a member of the Working Group tasked with designing the new curriculum, developing a strategy for its funding and sustainability, and engaging with the other 3 Schools of Pharmacy and the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland. 

Lorraine has supervised, to completion, 9 PhD, 6 MSc and 2 MD students. She is currently supervising 5 PhD students and an MD student. Each year, she typically supervises 3-4 pharmacy senior sophister projects, a medical student, an ERASMUS student and 2 transition year students. Lorraine has been a College Tutor for 3 years, for ~80 students from across the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Science.

Lorraine’s research programme at Trinity includes both basic and translational research. In the interest of cancer patients, this involves studies performed at the laboratory bench being advanced to clinical trials with the All Ireland Clinical Oncology Group (ICORG). Many anti-cancer drugs are available, but not all drugs are useful for all patients with any given cancer type. Furthermore, many of the newer more “targeted” drugs are very expensive. Lorraine’s research group is working to optimise drug combinations to suit individual cancer patients, while minimising side-effects. They are also studying signals (“companion biomarkers”) to help identify, in advance, patients for whom a particular drug is likely to be useful/not useful. Another component of this research is deciphering the manner by which cancer cells become resistant to anti-cancer drugs, in order to help overcome this resistance. Additionally, the group is optimising means of screening the usefulness of new anti-cancer drugs in the laboratory, so as to increase their ultimate success rate in the clinic. This research greatly benefits from experience that Lorraine has been fortunate to gain abroad (eg in Breakthrough Breast Cancer UK, University of Miami, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University) as well as from industry-led research. The potential impact and overall vision of her research group is to contribute to earlier diagnosis of cancer and patient-tailored drugs regimes for its treatment, thus contributing to treatment success, reduced side-effects, better quality of life and increased longevity. The unnecessary use of expensive drugs that simply could not work would also help to reduce the economic burden. Furthermore, helping to train the next generation of researchers required by the bio-pharma industry may contribute to securing this strength in Ireland. This research has contributed to 6 clinical trials, 68 peer-reviewed research publications, 2 books, 4 editorials, 9 book chapters and numerous (>100) published peer-reviewed abstracts and proceedings and a number of both Young Researcher and Researcher Awards e.g. from Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble, IACR, RAMI, Royal College of Physicians, DCU’s inaugural Research Fellowship, Albert College Fellowship.

This research would not be possible, however, without the good-will of patients, as well as multi-institutional, international academia/clinical/industry collaborations. The funding secured from Science Foundation Ireland, Health Research Board, Enterprise Ireland, National Institute of Health, IRCSET, Marie Keating Foundation, Danish Strategic Research Council, Trinity Foundation, Mater Hospital Foundation, EU FP7, and philanthropic donors is critical for this research. In the past 8 years, Lorraine has secured €4.5m (as Principal Investigator/PI) and a further >€42m (as Co-PI or Core-PI) to enable this research.

In addition to teaching and research, Lorraine welcomes the opportunity to contribute more broadly to her discipline, School, College, and Society. For example, she is Director of Research in her School. When requested, Lorraine has deputised for her Head of School at College meetings; chaired PhD viva voce; contributed to the design of a new MSc aimed at recent graduates and those in industry who may wish to up-skill; she is Editor for her School’s newsletter, The Elixir; and acts as Internal Examiner for many MSc/PhD transfers and PhD vice voca (in addition to being External Examiner for 18 PhDs). At a broader College level, Lorraine has sat on a number of interview panels; the Peter Gatenby Award Committee; Trinity Week 2011 Organising Committee; she has organised events for groups of Trinity Access Programmes (TAP) students; contributed to Trinity Foundation events when invited to do so; and presented examples of cancer research at TCD to industry visitors at events organised by Trinity Research Office. Research performed by Lorraine’s group has been the subject of articles published in national newspapers (eg The Irish Times) and short information session on the RTE News. 

In addition to essential collaborations within Ireland, Lorraine is a member of a number of international consortia. For example, Lorraine leads (2012-2017) an international consortium granted funding under EU FP7 cooperation in science and technology to collaborate on how cells in the body communicate. Scientists and clinicians from 16 European countries, 3 US States, Australia, and 5 companies will work together in this Network on Microvesicles and Exosomes in Health and Disease. Output from her group’s research has resulted in a number of disclosures and international patents filed and collaborations with Irish and international companies (including Pfizer, Puma, GSK, Adnagen AG).

Lorraine is an active member of many associations and societies. For example, she is a Director and Council Member of the Irish Association for Cancer Research (IACR); Committee Member of US-Ireland R&D Partnership Working Group facilitated by Inter-trade Ireland; UCLA Postgraduate Career Progression Advisor; Members of the Irish Cancer Society’s Research Capacity Building Advisory Committee; Invited Member of the International Institute of Anticancer Research Scientific Advisory Board; HETAC and ICORG Committees; Editorial Board member for 5 journals; reviewer for 15 international funding authorities and 31 journals. She has served as Organising Committee Member and Session Chair for 8 international conferences and is often (~4/year, as time allows) an invited or keynote speaker at international conferences. Lorraine also welcomes the opportunity to present to cancer patient groups and to budding researchers in primary and secondary schools.

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Carmel O'Sullivan

carmel-osullivanProfessor Carmel O’Sullivan is the Director of Initial Teacher Education and Coordinator of Continuing Professional Development for teachers and educators in the School of Education, Trinity College Dublin. She joined the staff in September 1998, having previously worked in teacher education in the UK. She holds qualifications in education and the arts from Mary Immaculate College of Education, (BEd), the London College of Music (ALCM), the University of Central England (PGDip and MA), and Birmingham City University (PhD).

Professor O’Sullivan teaches on a number of programmes in the School, and engaged in over 220 contact lecturing hours and 40 hours of professional school placement visits, with undergraduate and postgraduate students in 2011/12 in the following areas: PDE and BMus Ed (secondary school teaching – English, Drama, Sociology); MEd (Drama and Theatre in Education, Academic Reading and Writing, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education); PhD (Arts Based Research Methods). Prior to 2010/11, she additionally engaged in intensive teaching on the BEd and HDip (Primary) programmes which Trinity and the Associated Colleges of Education (Marino, Froebel, Church of Ireland College, and St. Catherine’s College of Home Economics) contributed to (totaling an average of 347 contact lecturing hours per annum).

Professor O’Sullivan is a regularly invited guest lecturer for national and international bodies and organisations, contributing to the development of creative and active teaching and learning approaches at all levels of the education system, from early years (she is just back from working with early childhood education teachers and Ministry of Education staff in Beijing), to university level (she regularly works with lecturing staff in other academic institutions in Ireland on communication and teaching and learning skills). She has teaching and research collaborations with colleagues in such countries as Romania, China, India, Australia, Canada, the UK, Palestine, Israel, Greece, the US and Turkey, and also shares her teaching and research expertise with colleagues in a number of institutions in Ireland.

Professor O’Sullivan’s approach to teaching and learning is research-led and directly related to her research interests in creative and active approaches to learning and teaching. In her various roles as Director of Undergraduate (UG) and Postgraduate (PG) Teaching and Learning in the School, as Coordinator of Continuous Professional Development and as course leader for her own subject areas, she has designed and re-structured full programmes such as the BEd, PGDip, PDE and MEd, introducing large scale academic and structural change at programme, course and modular level. All of her work in teaching and learning is constructively aligned so that material is regularly updated, learning outcomes and methods and criteria of assessment are harmonised, and the best use of new teaching and learning resources and ICT media are employed for a blended approach using face to face and online interactions. Carmel maintains professional contact with schools and educational institutions, which ensures that her teaching is consistently up to date, fresh, stimulating and relevant to the needs of student teachers and graduate students who attend her courses. When evaluating her teaching, students identify the value of the range of pedagogical techniques she employs in terms of assisting them in their exploration of content and skills, and they report that these newly acquired skills are not left in the domain of the lecture theatre but inform their thinking/practice in schools and educational settings, and result in an increased level of critical inquiry and engagement.

Professor O’Sullivan is currently supervising 12 PhD students, with 4 successfully completed and a further student in the examination process. She is supervising and co-supervising 11 masters students’ dissertations (currently in the examination phase). Many of her students are international, with students from China, Greece, Hong Kong, The Lebanon, Romania, India, Uganda, Vietnam, the UK, US, Spain, Turkey, Hungary, Canada and Ireland currently studying with her at postgraduate level. She operates a systematic approach to the supervision of her students who are fully supported and encouraged from the initial design of the inquiry through to final submission of their thesis.

Professor O’Sullivan engages in research in the areas of Drama and Theatre in Education and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Having conducted research into the role and value of Drama and Theatre in Education in the formal and non-formal educational sectors over a number of years, she has in recent years developed and led a longitudinal research project involving the development, trial and testing of a unique socio-cognitive intervention she calls the Social Drama Model (SDM). Data emerging from this study demonstrates the use of an efficacious cost-effective intervention for an underserved population, and which uniquely addresses the full spectrum of impairments typically associated with ASD. The intervention is shown to be flexible and capable of being designed to target specific participant behaviours, strengths and impairments, allowing for modification and re-orientation during the intervention process. This is in contrast to most existing social skills treatments and interventions which are prescribed, and whose rigidity is typically cited as a limitation resulting in a failure to address the needs of all members of this heterogeneous population and their condition. Notwithstanding the success of the drama intervention, which in itself is the only known study of its kind in the world, the most significant outcome from this research project is the sub-typing of the spectrum. This has resulted in the creation of a typology or classification which can be used as a diagnostic tool by professionals [in press], which significantly and substantially refines the diagnosis from Asperger Syndrome or Autistic Spectrum Disorder, to one of 11 very finely delineated sub-types. These outline the person’s characteristics, both physically and behaviourally, and provide the user with data on approaches, tools and strategies which work best when interacting with each sub-type. The diagnostic and educational use of this tool is far reaching, and to date trials have revealed a very high success rate nationally and internationally.

Professor O’Sullivan has achieved in excess of €900k in research funded grants and projects in which she has been involved in the last 10 years, she has collaborated on projects with research budgets in excess of €1.5m, and secured funding for 10 research students working in the area of education and the arts. She has published 3 books (with 2 more forthcoming), 3 educational DVDs, 7 book chapters (with 2 more forthcoming), 15 peer reviewed articles (with 3 in press), over 30 professional articles, numerous educational manuals, national curriculum guidelines for the NCCA on Drama for students with general learning disabilities, and featured in several radio and newspaper pieces. She has given over 13 invited keynote speeches and opening addresses at national and international conferences, 60 peer reviewed research conference papers, and over 110 invited research led seminars and workshops in universities, Colleges of Education and to professional bodies, governmental and non-governmental organisations in the areas of Drama and Theatre in Education and Autistic Spectrum Disorders nationally and internationally. She has acted as External Examiner in a number of institutions in Ireland and the UK, and is a member of the international editorial advisory committee for 4 peer-reviewed journals.

During her time in Trinity College, Professor O’Sullivan has held several major roles of academic and administrative responsibility in her School and throughout College. She was Warden of Trinity Hall, Coordinator of the 4 Associated Colleges of Education, Director of UG and PG studies, and has chaired or participated in over 25 College committees and 15 School level committees and groups. She has been responsible for introducing and overseeing several major restructuring programmes, and the development of many policies to improve quality assurance and practice in a number of areas, and to enhance student life and engagement with the Trinity experience.

Professor O’Sullivan’s reputation as an outstanding teacher and researcher has resulted in invitations to collaborate with colleagues worldwide in her field, and enhanced the reputation of Trinity College as a result. She is the founding member of the Association for Drama in Education in Ireland (ADEI), and was on the executive committee of the international subject association in her field for many years. She is a member of several international research and practice consortia in her research areas, and has served on a number of advisory boards and committees to government and public organisations, such as the NCCA, DES, Teaching Council, HETAC, IUQB, NAIRTL and PDST. She holds two directorships and is on the Board of Trustees for Russborough House.

As a resident, Professor O’Sullivan is involved in the community life and regeneration of the north inner city Dublin Docklands area. She is Chairperson of the North Port Dwellers Association (NPDA), and works with schools and teachers in her area. She assisted in securing funding to support postgraduate scholarships for excellent teachers working in the north inner city. She co-edited a book on the role of Saint Laurence O’Toole in the historical development of Dublin in 12th century Ireland to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the saint in her local community.

Professor O’Sullivan describes herself as an active and socially engaged teacher, educator and researcher who is committed to the value of education in young people’s lives, and who has worked for many years to nurture and develop high quality teaching and learning experiences across the full spectrum of society. Her significant impact has been locally, nationally and internationally attested to.

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Declan O'Sullivan

Declan O’Sullivan is a leading researcher with an international reputation for high quality and high impact research in the area of semantic interoperability for service management; a significant research-led educator and supervisor; and a major contributor to the successful operation of his discipline both within and outside of Trinity College Dublin.

Professor O’Sullivan was awarded a BA (Mod) in Computer Science from Trinity in 1985. He then worked as a Research Assistant in Trinity, and undertook a MSc in Computer Science part-time, which was awarded in 1988. Declan then joined industry working as research leader in Broadcom and IONA technologies between 1988 and 2001. After his appointment in Trinity in 2001 as a lecturer, he was awarded a PhD in Computer Science from Trinity in 2006, and a SFI principal investigator award in 2009.

It is currently impossible to get 2 computer-based services or applications that have been designed by different people independently and without prior knowledge of each other, to seamlessly talk to each other without significant intervention by integration specialists. This “semantic interoperability” problem remains one of the great un-solved challenges of computer science. The research being undertaken by Professor O’Sullivan and his team is significant as the innovations being developed will enable agile integration of computer-based services and applications to take place more rapidly. This will lead to reductions of cost and more timely availability of new services and applications.

The approach being pursued by Professor O’Sullivan and his team is to establish the theoretical, conceptual and algorithmic techniques that will enable the achievement of sustainable and manageable semantic mapping between diverse models by people other than integration specialists. Professor O’Sullivan has focused on application spaces where hetereogenity of models need to be overcome in an ongoing and sustainable manner in order to support delivery of end-to-end services in communication environments (through the SFI FAME: Federated Automomic Management Environment project); mult-lingual content within the web environment (through the SFI CNGL: Centre for Next Generation Localisation project); and pervasive computing services within built environments (through the HEA NEMBES: Network Embedded Systems project).

The research is aligned with 2 of Trinity’s key strategic research themes: Human and Social Media; and Telecommunications. In addition, the research area is also considered of strategic importance within the recent Irish Government research prioritisation exercise (sub area of Future Internet and Big Data). The research is having significant impact as can be seen through Professor O’Sullivan’s citation count of 726 and h-index of 14 [Google Scholar August 2012]. Professor O’Sullivan has 120 internationally peer reviewed publications in journal papers, book chapters, edited books and international conferences. These include publications in top journals in the area: IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Internet Computing; IEEE Communications Magazine; IEEE Network; Computer Networks Journal; Journal of Web Semantics; Journal of Network and Systems Management. Professor O’Sullivan has significant publication record in key conferences in the area, including the ISWC, ESWC, and ASWC semantic web conferences and in the top telecommunications management conferences, the IEEE IM and IEEE NOMS conferences.

Professor O’Sullivan’s research leadership in the area has led to awards of over €4m in the past 6 years to support the research, from Science Foundation Ireland, Higher Education Authority, and IRCSET. In addition Professor O’Sullivan has established strong links into industry including Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco and Intel, resulting in research collaboration and funding.

Professor O’Sullivan’s research activity has resulted in his being invited to undertake leadership roles within his discipline. This includes associate editorships in 2 of the top journals in the discipline: Journal of Network and Services Management; and the International Journal of Network Management. In addition Professor O’Sullivan has undertaken 10+ chairmanship roles in high impact IEEE conferences and workshops. A recent highlight was the successful local chair and publication chair roles in organising the IFIP/IEEE Integrated Management Symposium in Dublin in 2011 which attracted over 300 delegates and was widely viewed as a major success. In addition, Professor O’Sullivan is Trinity’s representative within the TeleManagement industrial forum (900 member companies involved in service creation, management and delivery) to promote dialogue between universities and industry. Nationally, Professor O’Sullivan been involved in the setup and operation of the Telecommunications Graduate Initiative (TGI) which is a cross-institute HEA-funded initiative to bring together leading members of the telecommunications community in Ireland with a view to producing more graduates ready to drive forward telecommunications research and industry in Ireland.

Since rejoining Trinity in 2001, Professor O’Sullivan has undertaken substantial teaching, supervision and external examination duties. Professor O’Sullivan’s teaching and commitment to discipline is research-led. His experience in working within the software industry for more than a decade, has informed his philosophy of teaching and learning computer science topics. Due to the fast moving nature of computer science and its application in information technology, the ability to problem-solve in ever changing environments is crucial. From a teaching perspective this has involved the embedding of his research-led philosophy into the 5 undergraduate and 2 postgraduate modules that he has developed and taught upon. Professor O’Sullivan has supervised to completion 8 PhD students, 28 Masters by Dissertation, 2 Masters by Research and 27 undergraduate Final Year Projects. Professor O’Sullivan is currently supervising 8 PhD students. In addition, he has been invited to conduct several examinations outside of Trinity internationally and nationally, including: the Dublin Institute of Technology Masters in Knowledge Management course; 5 external PhD examinations and 8 internal postgraduate examinations.

Professor O’Sullivan has contributed to the successful operation of the School of Computer Science and Statistics, and of college. As inaugural course director of the new BA (Mod) in Computer Science and Business course, he have been instrumental in the formation and operation of the course. This course is proving to be a very popular course amongst students, as well as being welcomed by both the business and IT communities.  He has been engaged in active stewardship as head of the Knowledge and Data Engineering research group (KDEG) within the school. The KDEG research group consists of 8 academics, 24 research staff and 35 postgraduate students and has attracted over 8M euro in research funding over the last 5 years. This role has involved the organisation of the group to facilitate: research collaboration across the group; a supportive active community of staff and students; the promotion of the activities of the group within and outside college. In addition to his involvement in committees that ensure the smooth operation of the School of Computer Science and Statistics, he has also represented Junior Staff as faculty representative at University Council. Recently, Professor O’Sullivan was elected by his peers as Head of the Discipline of Intelligent Systems.

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Sara Pavía

sara-paviaProfessor Sara Pavía, Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering was appointed to Trinity College as Assistant Professor in November 2002. She advanced beyond Merit Bar in February 2006. In 1993 she was awarded a PhD Cum Laudem from University of Zaragoza, Spain and also has MSc and BSc Science from that university. She was a Post doctoral Research Fellow at DIT (1997-2002) and at Trinity College Dublin (1994-1997).

Professor Pavía is author of 4 books. She has written chapters in 3 further books and has published 30 journal papers in leading journals and 47 peer reviewed conference papers.  Her expertise is sought by Technical Committees of European organisations such as CEN and RILEM, and she is member of 3 such committees. She has raised ~€1.5m in research funding and is currently managing 5 funded research projects and supervising 5 PhD students. Her most significant research awards since her last promotion in 2006 are by OPW, EPA, IRCSET, HEA, Government of Ireland Fellowship, USA’s Fullbright Scholarship, Enterprise Ireland and Trinity’s CMA. Her research is interdisciplinary, combining civil engineering with architecture and science.  Her research is distinct and well known in Europe in the fields of sustainable materials, lime mortar technology and material conservation in particular pozzolanic waste materials, hemp lime concrete, lime mortar and masonry.  She maintains interdisciplinary linkages with academic and professional engineers, scientists and architects in Ireland, Europe, USA and India. She worked in CEN/TC 51/WG 11/TG 1 setting and evaluating methods for chemical analyses and physical testing of building limes leading to the publication of European Standard EN 459-2:2010. Building lime. She also works in the RILEM Technical Committee BBM: Bio-aggregate based building materials, to set up and standardise physical testing methods and analytical techniques for biomaterials.

According to the Dean of Research’s Annual Report (12/05/2011), 6 of Professor Pavía’s publications were amongst the most downloaded of Trinity’s TARA repository, amounting to 9,983 downloads/views in 1 year. She secured National and private funding which she has used to set up and establish a materials laboratory in Trinity complying with European Standard requirements including flow table, bend wrench frame, mixing mills, curing chamber, strength testing frame and software, shrinkage gauges, heat flux measurement systems and other equipment. Her research has influenced the work of others including ISO (International Organization for Standardization); the European Committee for Standardisation –CEN-, and National government (OPW) and private institutions. She has investigated historic and traditional materials and structures in Ireland for 18 years and her research outcomes have been applied to National Monuments while others have assisted decision making on the conservation of National Monuments. 

Professor Pavía coordinates 4 courses (1 postgraduate) and lectures 7 courses in Trinity College and 2 further courses in UCD and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. She has designed a postgraduate diploma course, redesigned 3 undergraduate courses and contributed to the design of a further 3. She also undertakes a considerable annual supervision load in terms of number of dissertations. 8 of her MSc/PhD students have completed their theses and 2 further PhD students are currently submitting. She has recently started 2 new PhD programmes in the areas of sustainable composites and waste management. She continuously feeds her research results into her teaching. She has introduced several innovations in teaching including the incorporation of lime mortar and sustainable material technologies in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses as well as the inclusion of analytical techniques of the physical sciences into engineering. She has significantly contributed to the education of both engineers and architects in Ireland in the fields of masonry materials (lime mortar), sustainable materials and building repair.  When she joined College in 2002, she designed the Postgraduate Diploma in Building Repair and Conservation, including 131 lecturing hours, laboratories and site visits.  She recruited 50 lecturers from the Engineering, Geology and Art History Departments at Trinity as well as external lecturers from the architectural, surveying and archaeological professions.  This course has received excellent reviews. It has been favourably assessed by its external examiner and has been officially acknowledged by the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland and Engineers Ireland. Her teaching is often sought outside College. She has worked as a visiting Professor at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Escuela de Arquitectura) since 2010; University of Zaragoza (Faculty of Science) 2000-2005; UCD (School of Architecture) since 1996. She has also instructed professionals of the building industry at the Construction Industry Federation 1999-2010 and the Dublin Civic Trust 1998-2004; Chicago College of Art, 1998-2001.  She has also acted as an external examiner for many Institutions including Escuela de Arquitectos, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid; Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp ; Escuela de Aparejadores y Arquitectos Tecnicos, UPM; Department of Civil Engineering, UCD;  School of Construction, DIT; FP7 Brussels; Research Institute of Flanders; Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus and others.

Professor Pavía is the 1st year, Engineering Undergraduate Degree Co-ordinator and the Departmental International Student Co-ordinator since 2003. She is a member of the School of Engineering Admissions Committee (assisting in the assessment of mature students applying to enter the School of Engineering since 2005) and a member of the Freshman Student Liaison Committee (since 2006). In addition, she has undertaken the management tasks associated with the setting up and approval of the double Civil Engineering degree with INSA Lyon. As the Undergraduate Admissions Co-ordinator, she contributed to the establishment of the criteria for acceptance of candidates for direct entry from Institutes of Technology into Junior Sophister Engineering. Her contribution to administration and management is considerable. She is currently responsible for the administration and management associated with her 5 on-going research programmes. She became a College tutor and a member of the School of Engineering Court of First Appeal in 2012. In addition, she has tutored international students since 2003 and has acted as a mentor in the WiSER programme.  She has also contributed to the TAP programme (Departmental Trinity Access Programme Co-ordinator from 2004-2007). As the founder and director of the Postgraduate Diploma in Conservation and Building Repair she has made a valuable contribution to College since 2003. The revenue that this course generates has been used by College and also by the School to upgrade research equipment. This postgraduate course has an outstanding reputation and has been included in The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland conservation accreditation system, contributing to the excellent academic reputation of Trinity College.

Professor Pavía has acted as conservation advisor for the Office of Public Works and the Heritage Council, contributing to decision making in relation to National Monuments. She is a member of the State Examination Commission, collaborating in the preparation of the Living Certificate examination papers and marking schemes since 2012. She has acted as a European expert evaluator for FP7-NMP- (research for SMEs), Brussels. She is a reviewer for scientific journals including: J of Materials in Civil Engineering; Construction and Building Materials; Building and Environment; J of Environmental Management; Archaeometry; Int J of Architectural Heritage; and a member of conference scientific committees such as 2nd Conference on Construction and Building Research, University de Valencia; Bridge and Concrete Research Ireland Conference 2012; BCRI 2010 and others before 2010.

Professor Pavía has worked in industry. She set up a company (1994-2000) providing advice on conservation of historic structures. She has worked with multidisciplinary teams on conservation plans including Provost’s House, Trinity College; St Lachtain’s Church (Freshford) and Clonfert Cathedral (Galway). She worked as a consultant for public bodies and engineering and architectural companies in Europe including Dublin City Council; Arnold Architects; CPA sl; CORESAL; Carrig Int; ENSATEC; M Gowan & Co Ltd; G Scally Arch; M Quinlan Arch, T Foley Arch; Ruane Architects, D Nolan Engineers; TP Cooper, Director of Buildings at Trinity; Slattery Arch; COMSA; Sheraton Builders; Finn Steplejacks; Howley Hayes Architects; Town Park States; Brazil & Associates; Hanley & Pepper Ltd; Galway City Council; Red Arc Ltd; Shaffrey & Associates; North West Archaeological Services Ltd.; Clifton Scannell Emerson Associates; ACOL Ltd.; Thorburn Colquhoun Ireland Ltd.; PH McCarthy & Partners; URS Engineering and others. She maintains close links with senior conservation architects and archaeologists at the OPW and the Dept of the Environment, holding research seminars every 6 months since the date of her appointment.  She also maintains a close relationship with industrial companies in Ireland and Europe and has managed to obtain sponsorship to host seminars and buy research equipment. In the last 3 years, she has been invited to speak to wide audiences including The Building Limes Forum 2012; the Earth and Natural Sciences Doctoral Programme funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA) through the Programme for Research at Third Level Institutions (PRTLI), Dublin, 2011 and 2012; OPW/BLFI workshop ‘strength of lime mortars’, Athenry, 2011; RILEM Technical workshop on biomaterial testing, BBM, Paris, 2011; EuLA. European Lime Association, Roundtable Science-Industry "lime in mortars" – Dresden, 2010; Sustainable building materials, Transforming Ireland seminar series, Dublin, Nov 2010; RILEM Technical workshop on biomaterials, TCBBM Paris, 2010; Institut für Kalk- und Mörtelforschung e.V. Köln, 2009; CEN/TC51/WG11, Current lime mortar and masonry research, Köln, 2009.

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Clionadh Raleigh

clionadh-raleighProfessor Clionadh Raleigh, Department of Geography, joined Trinity College Dublin in 2008. She was awarded a PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2007; the title of her dissertation was     “The Political Geography of Civil War: Insurgencies in Central Africa”. She completed a Master of Geography from University of Colorado, Boulder in 2004 and a BA in Geography from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2000.
                                                                  
She teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate courses, with a concentration on Political Geography, Quantitative Methods, GIS, and African Politics. Over her 4 years at Trinity, she has averaged 220 contact hours, 280 including marking. She has designed or re-designed every module she has responsibility for. She directs the Masters in Environment and Development (2009-2012) where she also serves as a tutor for all students. She supervises dissertations for an average of 4 students per year.  During her year in Political Science, she co-created the Masters in International Relations. She participates in the postgraduate series of lectures on methodologies for studying developing countries through TIDI and also focuses on reviewing and refining tools and methods training in Natural Science.

She has 2 PhD students (1 in the Political Science department and 1 in the Geography department).

Professor Raleigh’s research asks a fundamental question: what explains the rise and persistent use of violence as a political tool in African states? To answer, she concentrates on conflict geography, trends, patterns and causes. Her research is informed by both geography and politics and is focused on the ‘micro politics of Africa’, ‘the political consequences of environmental change’ and ‘conflict information, trends and trajectories’. She created and directs the most comprehensive, publically available conflict event dataset (ACLED). A team of 20 coders collects information on political violence in over 50 countries from 1997-2012 that allows her to investigate new local patterns, actors and causes of political violence. Her work is known specifically for the application of new spatial and temporal statistical methods to capture complex emergencies arising in unstable areas. These are outlined in several recent publications.

She has been very successful in securing grants to forward her work. In particular, the European Research Council’s Young Investigator Grant allows her to establish her own research group and center. This was built on previous successes: a major grant from the World Bank allowed for ACLED-Africa (with Asian additions) to be completed in 2 years (2008-2010). The Irish Council for Social Sciences and Humanities in 2008 offered a generous grant to examine governance and vulnerability to climate change in African States. In 2009, she joined a transnational team in a $7m grant for the US Minerva project on African Political Stability. Additional smaller grants from Trinity College have allowed her to hire and train over 20 students in political geography; and over 30 Masters students have been trained in the political geography of conflict. Finally, her recent ERC grant allows her to hire a team to work on 5 work packages relating to African conflict processes, trends, triggers, and predictions.  In total, my own research funding amounts to over €2m.

She is the ‘Development Champion’ for College; she is a member of the Natural Science Research Committee; she is on the steering committee for the Trinity International Development Initiative; she directs a Masters program in College and serves as a tutor for all students; she is the Erasmus coordinator in Geography; and the academic president of the Geography Club.

Her work is interdisciplinary; hence many of her co-authored publications are with academics from other international departments. She created and now directs the most comprehensive public collection of African conflict data (ACLED); publishes a monthly trend report on African conflict for governments, NGOs, practioners, students and journalists; is a senior external researcher at the International Peace Research Association (PRIO) in Norway; a managing member of a COST initiative on European Conflict Research; a contributing author to the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2015; a consultant for the World Bank and DfID on African Conflict; member of the research grant committee for the International Studies Association; and member of the Royal Irish Academy’s Geographical Sciences Committee.

She sits on 2 editing boards for Political research journals; is a reviewer for PNAS, United States National Science Foundation; Journal of Political Geography; American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Peace Research; Journal of Conflict Resolution; International Interactions; International Studies Perspectives; Association of American Geographers; British Journal of Political Science; Peace Sciences.
She is a member of several Interdisciplinary Committees including Geographic Influences on War, Micro-Con, Peace Sciences, International Studies Association, American Association of Geographers, American Association of Political Science, Environmental Governance, Royal Irish Academy Geographic Sciences Committee, Trinity International Development Initiative, Climate Justice Research Group.

She develops curricula for African universities to teach Environmental Security and Political Geography courses and attends several international conferences a year.

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Carlos Rocha

carlos-rochaProfessor Carlos Rocha holds an undergraduate diploma (5 years) in Technological Chemistry (University of Lisbon, 1991) and a PhD in Marine Sciences (Chemistry and Biogeochemistry) suma cum laude also from the University of Lisbon (1997). In addition, he holds postgraduate degrees in Industrial Environmental Impact Analysis (1992, Technical University of Lisbon) and Marine Microbial Ecology (1994, Ronbjerg, Denmark). He joined the College as Lecturer in Environmental Change in October 2007 and was offered an MA (jure officii) by Trinity in 2011.

He teaches courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At undergraduate he teaches GG4039 ‘Understanding Environmental Change’ (SS, Earth Sciences, optional for Geography, TSM and Natural Sciences) and GG2299 ‘Geochemistry for Earth Scientists’ (SF, Earth Sciences). At postgraduate he teaches ES7045/ED7003 Environmental and Climate Change and ES 7049 Practical Environmental Skills including an overseas field course.

As Course Director, Professor Rocha holds responsibility for overarching curriculum design, management and coordination of the Taught Masters in Environmental Science (TRS45), where he also coordinates ES7051 Introduction to Environmental Sciences, ES7302 Desk Studies and the Project Planning and Dissertation components of the course. Professor Rocha’s teaching contact hours have averaged 210 annually since 2009 (248 in 2011-2012).

To date, he has supervised 1 Postdoctoral Fellow, 3 PhD and 20 MSc students to completion (currently has 6 PhD and 6 MSc students under supervision). Professor Rocha regularly incorporates research currently being carried out within his group in his lectures and practical courses, frequently embedding students (both under- and postgraduate) in his research activities, in the laboratory or in the field.

Professor Rocha leads the Biogeochemistry Research Group in Trinity. The group comprises 13 collaborators (8 researchers in Ireland and 5 in Portugal). Since his appointment, his main research effort has focused on the development of an internationally authoritative research programme primarily directed at the study of coastal systems hosting Submarine Groundwater Discharge, with a view to evaluating their role as interceptors of the flow of chemical species (including pollutants) from the continental margin to the coastal zone and expanding this nuclear interest, as it strengthened, into the quantitative assessment of transfer and reaction processes across the aquatic realm, from lakes to the deep sea. His research focuses on processes affecting the transport, fate and impact of chemical species, including contaminants, in aquatic ecosystems. The ultimate goal is to comprehend ecosystem functional plasticity in response to anthropogenic pressure, climate change and biological activity. Practical applications include increased knowledge on the resilience of marine systems to environmental change with a view to defining and supporting the implementation of sustainable environmental policy and management practice.

Professor Rocha has published 29 academic pieces of work in the international indexed peer-reviewed literature to date, in journals with high impact factors (eg, Limnology & Oceanography, IF=3.385; Biogeochemistry, IF=2.674; Marine Ecology Progress Series, IF=2.48; Remote Sensing of Environment, IF=3.951; Limnology and Oceanography: Methods, IF=1.823; Journal of Sea Research, IF=2.444; Chemosphere, IF=3.155). His work has been cited more than 200 times so far, and his Hirsch (h) index is currently 8, and rising. His research takes place in 4 countries, and his network of working collaborations covers 6 countries.

Since his appointment to Trinity College, Professor Rocha has obtained a total of €2.057m (career total: €2.714m) in direct research funding or equivalent services, from a variety of sponsors, including the EU, the Irish Government, Research Council and EPA, the Portuguese Government and National Science Foundation, the Chinese Government, the German and Danish Science foundations, amongst others.

Professor Rocha received several awards and distinctions throughout his career to date, including a nomination for the Lindemann Award (American Society for Limnology and Oceanography, USA, 2001), The IMAR/Luis Saldanha Young Researcher Award in Marine Science and Technology (in 2000, runner up in 2003) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Young Researcher Award in Environmental Chemistry (1999).
He is a member of the European Association of Geochemistry; American Society of Limnology and Oceanography; American Geophysical Union; Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Association (elected Council member, 2010-2012).

He has served on the Centre for the Environment Management Committee from 2009 to date. Since 2009 he has been the Course Director of the taught Masters in Environmental Science (TRS45). He chairs the Course Committee meetings and the Board of Examiners. He has been on the Environmental Sciences Moderatorship Committee from 2009 where he has a dual role, acting as a liaison with the MSc in Environmental Science and the discipline of Geography. Since 2010 he has been a member of the Earth Sciences Moderatorship Committee and in 2009 participated in the Centre for Women in Science and Engineering Research (WiSER) pilot mentoring programme. He was appointed as College tutor in 2012, with a half chamber in Science.

He has been a regular peer reviewer for several indexed scientific journals since 1999, e.g., Journal of Sea Research, Marine Chemistry, Limnology and Oceanography, Limnology & Oceanography: Methods, Remote Sensing and the Environment, Estuarine Coastal and Shelf Science, Biogeochemistry, Science of the Total Environment, Marine Ecology Progress Series, Hydrobiologia, amongst others. Since 2004 he is Associate Editor of  “Journal of Sea Research” and in 2012 is the external peer-reviewer for the Israel Science Foundation. From 2009 to 2012 he was the Irish representative of COST action ES0801 “The Ocean Chemistry of bioactive trace elements and paleoclimate proxies”. From 2009 to 2011 he was the expert evaluator for the Research Executive Agency (REA), Brussels (EU).
From 2009 to 2011 he was marine nutrient chemistry expert for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and in 2008 was external peer-reviewer for the Maryland Sea-Grant Program, USA. In 2007 he was external peer-reviewer for the American Chemical Society – Petroleum Research Fund (ACS-PRF).

Professor Rocha has delivered several keynote and public lectures on his research, including most notably, within the Royal Society of Chemistry lecture series, at The International Atomic Energy Agency and at international conferences organized by the IGBP (International Geosphere Biosphere Programme) and the ISME (International Society for Microbial Ecology).

Professor Rocha has delivered public outreach lectures (eg, to the Dublin Women’s Club) on environmental issues of topical relevance, organised exhibitions (e.g., on marine photography, in Zoology in 2011) and supports public awareness on environmental topics (eg: http://www.underwater-ireland.com).

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Wolfgang Schmitt

wolfgang-schmittProfessor Wolfgang Schmitt joined Trinity College as a lecturer in October 2005. He studied Chemistry at the Technical University Darmstadt (TU), Germany and graduated as Dipl Ing (Chemistry) in 1999. He was awarded the Dr Anton Keller Prize from the University of Darmstadt and received his PhD from the University of Karlsruhe in 2002. From 2002-2003 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In March 2004 he was selected to join the International Centre for Young Scientists at the National Institute for Materials Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan as an independent research fellow (selected from ca. 700 applicants). He was elected as a Fellow of Trinity College in 2009. Currently he is the Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Chemistry. He is a member of the CRANN Nanotechnology Centre.

Professor Schmitt’s research interests focus on advanced synthetic chemistry of hybrid organic-inorganic materials aiming to exploit these unique materials for sustainable energy applications and for nanoscale molecular magnetic and electronic data storage and read-out devices. Current activities focus on porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for hydrogen storage applications, CO2 fixation and activation, bio-mimetic syntheses of new materials for regenerative medical systems and synthetic approaches to nanoscopic clusters with unique electronic and magnetic properties. Professor Schmitt’s research results are published (over 40 peer reviewed papers) in top scientific journals and many articles have been highlighted on title pages. Several main author articles appeared in Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed. This journal is one of the prime chemistry journals in the world, with an Impact Factor higher than those of comparable chemistry journals. Several other articles were published in other prestigious journals including Chemical Communications and Journal of the American Chemical Society. In addition to the dissemination of research results in articles, he presented his work at international conferences and university seminars (more than 30 invited talks). Since 2009, he and his group members gave 20 oral presentations at conferences and meetings. Since January 2011, he received 6 invitations to present his research at university seminars.
Between 2006 and 2010 Professor Schmitt was awarded a SFI Principal Investigator grant and 3 SFI Research Frontiers Grants which, according to the SFI, support innovative, cutting-edge and internationally competitive research to allow for changes in strategic areas in the future and to provide a broad base of support to underpin the strategic areas eg Information and Communications Technology, and Sustainable Energy and Energy-Efficient Technologies. He obtained 4 IRCSET postgraduate and postdoctoral fellowship grants and a research grant from the Environmental Protection Agency Ireland (EPA). He is the Irish representative and member of the managing committee of an EU research initiative involving 17 countries.        Professor Schmitt has raised ca. €1.7m as principal investigator.

After establishing his research group at the end of 2006, Professor Schmitt’s team reached a size consisting of 12-14 co-workers including postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. The group has presented the work at many international conferences. Professor Schmitt’s students were awarded with several poster prizes and Giuseppe La Spina who was working on gas storage materials received a ‘British Oxygen Company (BOC)’ award for his achievements. Annemarie O’Toole was awarded the 1st prize at the national round and the 3rd prize in the international round (Stockholm) of the ‘Global IP to Product‘ competition, highlighting how our research accomplishments can be commercialised.

Professor Schmitt believes that teaching is an essential part of academic life adding value to the profession and providing motivation for a constant engagement with important scientific concepts whose understanding is also a requirement for high level research. He has developed several undergraduate lecture courses for freshman and sophister students as well as new postgraduate courses. Professor Schmitt teaches fundamental chemical concepts to incoming students (ca. 400 students) and advanced topics to undergraduates across all years within the four moderatorships offered by the School of Chemistry. His undergraduate and postgraduate  teaching portfolio includes courses such as ‘Introduction to Chemistry’, ‘Advanced Coordination Chemistry’, ‘Inorganic Chemistry of the Environment’, ‘Structural Methods in Inorganic Chemistry’, ‘Cluster Chemistry’, ‘Main Group Organometallic Chemistry’ and ‘Topics in Inorganic Chemistry’ and ‘X-ray Crystallography’. As Director of Teaching and Learning he is responsible for the teaching activities in the School of Chemistry, the curriculum design and the course developments. He was strongly involved in the restructuring of the JS year, the change of SS assessment procedures, the establishment of the Dublin Chemistry graduate school and the organisation of a student exchange programme with the National Institute of Material Sciences, Japan. Professor Schmitt currently supervises 7 postgraduate students. He has had 4 successful PhD candidates and 2 group members will complete their PhDs before the end of 2012.  He usually employs 1-2 summer students per year and hosts visiting students and collaborating researchers. He has supervised and examined many final year research projects.

Professor Schmitt contributes significantly to College life. As the current Director of Teaching and Learning he oversees all teaching activities in the School of Chemistry and as a member of the Executive Committee, he occupies a senior administrative role. Professor Schmitt has made a significant contribution to the administrative work in Trinity. He has played an important role in development of research and teaching strategies in the School of Chemistry and Trinity College. He represents the School in the Undergraduate Studies and the Science steering committees, and chairs the School's teaching committee and ‘Court of Examiners’ meetings. Other direct responsibilities include the submission of examination papers, liaison with external examiners, representing the School at the Faculty Court of Appeal, coordination of inter-School programmes, and conducting programme reviews. He has been a College tutor for the past 4 years and is the disability officer in the School of Chemistry. He has significantly enhanced collaborative links to leading institutes in Asia. He initiated a MOU with the prestigious National Institute for Materials Sciences Japan to promote collaborations in the sustainable energy area. He represented Trinity and Ireland at a visit to China to enhance inter-institutional collaborations and student exchanges with prime Chinese Universities.

Previously, Professor Schmitt represented Trinity in the ‘Dublin Chemistry’ committee which steers the activities of the joint UCD/TCD graduate school. He was involved in the establishment of this inter-institutional graduate school which strengthens the international competitiveness of the two institutions. Between 2007 and 2009 he was the coordinator for the  2nd and 3rd academic years and  between 2010-2011, he was as the final year coordinator and responsible for the final year Chemistry examinations.

Based on research activities towards artificial photosynthesis systems that readily absorb CO2 and convert it into fuels, in 2011 Professor Schmitt filed 6 Irish, European and US American Patent applications. Together with the entrepreneur Vincent Browne (Flint Telecom), Professor Schmitt is exploring avenues to commercialise the IP, resulting from these activities. Wolfgang is a referee for highly reputable journals in Chemistry such as Angewandte Chemie, Chemistry - A European Journal, European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Chemical Communications, Dalton Transactions, Chemistry of Materials, New Journal of Chemistry, CrystEngComm, Journal of the American Chemical Society and others.
He was reviewer of grant proposals for the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) and is a member of the German Chemical Society (GDCh). Professor Schmitt served as an internal and external examiner for 9 PhD viva voce examinations.

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Helen Sheridan

helen-sheridanProfessor Helen Sheridan BSc (Hons), MA (jo), PhD (NUI) was educated in St. Paul's Secondary School in Greenhills Dublin, Ireland. She completed her BSc (Hons) in Chemistry in UCD (1980) where she was awarded several college prizes for performance in Sophister years including the Hugh Ryan Memorial Gold Medal for first place in her degree and a National Board for Science and Technology (NBST) Undergraduate Summer Fellowship for research in UCD.  Helen completed her PhD in UCD (1983) under the direction of Professor DMX Donnelly, where her research centred on bioactive fungal metabolites and was funded by a Department of Education Research Scholarship. She was subsequently awarded a ‘Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851’ Overseas Fellowship for Postdoctoral research which was carried out at the Dyson Perrin’s laboratories at Oxford University, in the area of penicillin biosynthesis, under the direction of Professor Sir Jack Baldwin. This was followed by a short period of research on natural product chemistry at the laboratories of Nobel Laureate, Professor Sir Derek Barton at Gif-sur-Yvette. Helen was awarded a Department of Education Postdoctoral fellowship for independent research at UCD prior to her appointment as a lecturer in Natural Products Chemistry to the Department of Pharmacognosy, School of Pharmacy in Trinity College Dublin in 1985.

Since her appointment to Trinity, Helen has lectured on all aspects of the Natural Product (Pharmacognosy) curriculum to the BSc (Pharm) degree at Freshman and Sophister levels - teaching students a subject she loves. She believes enthusiasm coupled with well prepared and clearly presented material, is fundamental to capturing the interest and imagination of the students. She tries to promote intellectual curiosity and excitement at all levels and in all learning environments, believing this to be the cornerstone of real learning. Helen uses a research-led teaching approach wherever possible, taking examples from real life and current research to illustrate concepts.  She has introduced seminars and workshops and problem based learning (PBL), which she finds particularly useful for stimulating imagination and synergy, cultivating reading, investigation, and revealing the satisfaction of discovering things independently. Helen also lectures at Master’s level in Pharmacy and contributes aspects of Global Health to the MDP (Master’s Degree in Development Practice). She was one of the core team instrumental in the preparation of the successful application to the McArthur Foundation (Columbia University) by Trinity to act as a hub for the international and inter-institutional MDP Degree. Helen has supervised research at Master’s Doctoral and Postdoctoral level for both national and international students. She holds several senior positions within the University. She currently serves on: the Steering Committee of The University International Development body - TIDI (Trinity International Development Initiative); the University and Faculty Safety Committees; she is a member of University Disciplinary Committee. She holds the position of School Disability Liaison Officer.

Helen has initiated and has personally been actively involved in outreach programmes within the University providing science workshops, lectures and career advice at primary and secondary school level. Members of her research group are also invited and expected to participate in such initiatives. She has also hosted interns within her laboratory and is pleased to have assisted a number of interns in securing employment.

Helen has published 41 scientific papers; 4 book chapters: H index 11. She has 5 patents granted internationally and 4 under review. Throughout her career Helen has undertaken original research in the development of new medicines and biologically active chemicals using plants and cell cultures (plant, fungal and animal). She has also been involved in the use of biotechnology for the sustainable production of natural products. In addition Helen is involved in research into Traditional Medicine in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Her main areas of interest lie in the discovery of new therapies for diseases related to inflammation, autoimmune disease and cancer. Helen has received considerable non-exchequer funding from national and international sources (€6m) to support her research which is the subject of 5 granted patents and 4 currently under review. Helen currently co-ordinates and leads the Natural Product drug discovery group in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and sits on the School's Research Committee.

Helen was appointed to the Irish medicines Board in 2000 and currently serves on the Herbal Medicines sub-committee reporting to the Human Medicines Committee. She is a member of an EU-FP7 funded international Sino-European consortium, led by King’s College London, coordinating international research activities applying functional genomics in the context of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Helen has recently been invited to act as Grant Evaluator for the IFS (The International Foundation for Science) Sweden and has served on the Medical Sciences judging panel for the Undergraduate Awards of Ireland and Northern Ireland since their foundation. She is one of the Founder members of the International GP-TCM Research Association established earlier this year in the Netherlands. Helen is Co-founder of Trino Therapeutics Ltd (formerly Pharmatrin Ltd.) a Trinity campus company.

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Stefan Sint

stefan-sintProfessor Stefan Sint is Associate Professor in Theoretical Physics, School of Maths at Trinity College Dublin. After undergraduate studies of physics in Hamburg and Marseille, Professor Sint obtained  his PhD in 1994 from the University of Hamburg. He continued as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute in Munich, at Florida State University and at the University of Rome II. After a stint as a fellow at CERN in Switzerland he moved to a tenure track appointment at the Autonomous University of Madrid. When he had to choose between permanent appointments in France, Germany or Ireland he decided to accept the offer from the School of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin, where he has been a lecturer since 2006.

His published research is highly cited and he is a referee for most peer-reviewed journals in the field. He has been invited as plenary speaker to international conferences and he has served on the international scientific advisory board of the main conferences in his research area. He has successfully applied for research grants at the national level in Spain, France and Ireland, as well as for European grants.

His research focuses on various theoretical aspects of elementary particle physics. In the quest for the discovery of as yet unknown physics we first need to precisely know what our current theory, the Standard Model of the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions, actually predicts. This is particularly difficult if the strong interactions get involved, which are described by Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) in terms of quarks and gluons. The most promising method starts by approximating continuous space-time by a regular grid of points called a lattice. QCD in a finite space-time volume can then be simulated on a computer. Numerical simulations play the role of a pseudo experiment requiring significant amounts of computer time on some of the world's largest computers, as well as continued efforts to improve both the design of the pseudo experiments and the numerical algorithms. After many years of development (lattice QCD was first proposed in the late 70s and first computer simulations started in the early eighties), we are now in the position to make precise predictions for many quantities of physical interest.

As a lecturer he has taught various modules at all levels, from mathematics for freshmen science students to senior sophister modules in theoretical physics. He has supervised numerous final year projects of theoretical physics students and he is the current or past supervisor of 4 PhD students. Furthermore, he has been invited on various occasions to lecture at international summer schools targeted at advanced PhD students and young postdocs. In theoretical physics and mathematics there is a continuum of ideas that leads from the foundations up to the latest research. In his view his approach to problems in research is positively influenced by the need to explain similar ideas to students and vice versa.

The School of Mathematics is a relatively small department which means that he quickly got to take on administrative duties which are normally reserved for more senior members of staff. In particular he has been the Director of Postgraduate Teaching and Learning since 2008 and thus responsible for the postgraduate students of the school. In this role he has also been a member of the Executive Committee of the School.
Professor Sint strongly believes that the general public has a right to be well-informed about the latest research results which it has helped to fund. Particle physics continues to fascinate many people as is noticeable when giving public talks at open days or in secondary schools. There was a great excitement this summer after the discovery of a particle that could turn out to be the elusive Higgs boson. He has been a co-organiser of a session on this discovery  at the European Science Open Forum in Dublin, and of a corresponding public event at the Royal Irish Academy. He is also part of an initiative to bring particle physics master classes to Ireland. These allow secondary school students to get their hands on real data from CERN and discuss it via video link with their peers in other countries, thus emulating the way large experimental particle physics collaborations function today.

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Sam Slote

sam-sloteSam Slote has an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA from Wesleyan University. He joined College in January 2007 and became a Fellow in 2012.

Professor Slote teaches modules at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum in English. In addition to the Freshman modules ‘Theories of Literature’ and ‘Introduction to Modernism’, he teaches Sophister-level modules on both Joyce and Beckett. He also teaches a module on Joyce for the MPhil in Irish Writing. In addition to his teaching work in the School of English, he teaches on the undergraduate course in Irish Studies and for 3 MPhil courses: Comparative Literature, Literary Translation, and Digital Humanities. To date he has supervised 1 MLitt and 3 PhD dissertations to completion and currently has 5 PhD students working under his supervision.

Professor Slote is currently finishing a monograph on Nietzsche’s influence on Joyce. His new edition of Ulysses, just published by Alma Classics in September, contains over 9,000 all-new annotations and was the result of almost 3 years of research. He is the co-editor of 2 books due to be published in early 2013: Renascent Joyce and Joyce and Derrida: Texts and Contexts.

In addition to the forthcoming works mentioned above, Professor Slote has authored 3 monographs and over 40 articles for journals and essay collections, and has co-edited 3 volumes. Besides his work on Joyce and Beckett, he has written on other Modernists, such as Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Queneau, and Elvis.

Since 1992, Professor Slote has given over 60 different papers at various conferences and symposia in over a dozen different countries. In 2008, he was elected to a 6-year term as a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. From 2007–2012 he was the James Joyce editor for This Year’s Work in English Studies. He is an advisory editor for the following journals: Dublin James Joyce Journal, English Text Construction, Genetic Joyce Studies.

Since 2009 he has been the Director of Postgraduate Teaching and Learning for the School of English. Beyond the regular administrative load of this position (chairing transfer/confirmation interviews, chairing viva voce examinations, administering PhD applications, administering studentship allocations, etc), he has conducted seminars on the academic job market for PhD students in the School of English.

He coordinated the School of English Evening Lecture Series in Hilary Term 2011/12 and set the series topic, ‘Literary Friendships’.

Professor Slote is a founding Co-Director of the annual Samuel Beckett Summer School. This began in 2011 and is a co-production of the School of English and the School of Drama, Film and Music.

In 2008 Professor Slote was an academic coordinator for the XXIst International James Joyce Symposium at the Université François-Rabelais, Tours, France. He also served as both an academic coordinator and organiser for the XXIIIrd International James Joyce Symposium, held at Trinity and UCD on 10–16 June this year.

Professor Slote is an active collaborator in the digital project Inside Joyce’s Dublin, an on-going collaboration between Trinity, UCD, the National Library of Ireland, the Dublin James Joyce Centre, and RTÉ to create a digital resource that will reflect both the factual and historical Dublin of Joyce around 1904.

Professor Slote has given numerous guest lectures since his appointment to Trinity, the list includes: the National Gallery of Ireland, the James Joyce Centre, the Trieste James Joyce Summer School, the New York James Joyce Society, and multiple lectures at the Dublin James Joyce Summer School.

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Paul Spiers

paul-spiersProfessor Paul Spiers’ educational background includes a degree in Biochemistry and a PhD in Cardiovascular Pharmacology from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). In 1991, his academic career began as a result of a scholarship to work as a Research Fellow at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, on the development of microelectrode techniques to investigate adrenergic modulation in cardiac tissues. He then returned to a post-doctoral position at QUB, where he continued to pursue a number of investigations of electrophysiological mechanisms associated with cardiac disorders. In 1999, following appointment to an Academic Lectureship at Trinity College Dublin, he set up a scientific laboratory in the Department of Pharmacology, and began a number of cellular investigations of tissue remodelling associated with disease development and progression. During those early years, he was also awarded an honorary MA whilst fulfilling a significant teaching commitment.

His teaching commitments are largely concentrated within the School of Medicine, but he also contributes significantly to lectures and tutorials in additional courses, including Human Health and Disease, Dentistry and several taught Masters Programmes, totalling approximately 170 contact hours with the students. He is the Academic Lead and Co-ordinator for a Research Projects Module, undertaken by 2nd Year Medical Students, which involves considerable interdisciplinary involvement; this is an innovative flagship initiative, which is unique in Ireland and UK. It is dedicated to developing research interest and experience as an integral component to understanding in Medicine. This programme involves placement of approximately 170 students with research groups throughout College, across multiple departments including Physiology, Medicine, Microbiology, Pharmacy, Chemistry, Anatomy, and the affiliated teaching hospitals of St James’s, Adelaide, Meath and Tallaght. In addition to other substantial administrative duties, he is Co-ordinator of the Pharmacology and Human Health and Disease modules.

During his time at Trinity, he has supervised 7 PhD students; 5 of these have successfully completed their PhD and 2 students are currently working in his laboratory. In addition, he has a further PhD student joining his group later this year. He has also supervised 6 Masters students and 7 Summer Students.

Over the years, Professor Spiers has implemented a number of innovative approaches to teaching, in order to encourage students to probe and question their curiosity and also to inspire an appetite for in-depth understanding; these aspects have been experienced through the introduction of the Research Projects Module. Also, an important aspect of his pursuit of innovative teaching has been to stimulate learning of ‘dry’ facts, through fun and memorable approaches, such as targeted crosswords, and interactive learning support. He received a learning innovation award from CAPSL, in 2005, to develop an interactive web-based continual assessment for pharmacology. He has also designed, and is currently preparing a Laboratory Skills Workshop for the medical students, which will be coming on-line this academic year. Furthermore, he is a recipient of the Provost’s Teaching award (2008).

He is a College Tutor (5 years), which is a unique role specific to College offering significant support to students requiring help.

Professor Spiers’ research at Trinity has been primarily focused on investigations into the regulation of tissue remodelling during the development and progression of diseases such as hypertension, heart failure and viral infections (Hepatitis C and HIV). In particular, this work is geared towards a better understanding of an important group of enzymes, namely, matrix metalloproteinases, in these disease processes.  Typically, his laboratory uses molecular and cellular biological approaches to comprehend how different modulatory mechanisms influence outcome through signalling crosstalk, and also how specific pharmacological interventions impact such mechanisms. 

Amongst recent successes in pursuit of cardiovascular understanding, his group identified a unique mechanistic pathway responsible for decreased matrix metalloproteinase activity following exposure to b-adrenoceptor agonists, such as adrenaline. This finding has important implications for the development of new pharmacological targets, as they uncover the involvement of novel proteins linked to the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease.  In addition, they are engaged in a complementary program of investigations, where they have identified decreases in matrix metalloproteinase activity in Hepatitis C-infected patients following treatment with pegylated interferon and ribavirin.  Interestingly, this effect appears to be mediated by immune cells rather than cell types directly associated with liver fibrosis.  Findings from this line of enquiry have important implications towards understanding “off-target” adverse effects experienced by patients receiving HIV and Hepatitis C therapy.  Knowledge of these molecular factors and their involvement in normal physiology and pathophysiology of disease will assist in the rational design of improved therapeutic strategies.  By using an integrated translational approach, it is envisaged that studies by his group will provide a clearer understanding of the mechanism contributing to tissue remodelling, and provide a basis for novel therapeutic strategies to limit adverse tissue remodelling.

Professor Spiers has published 35 research papers, which have been cited over 500 times and have a h-index of 12. To date, his research funding has amounted to over €2m, which incorporates both project and programme grants.

He is a member of several learned societies including the British Pharmacological Society and the International Society for Heart Research.

He has served on several committees within College including the Academic Appeals Committee, Freshman-planning Group, and is the Biological Safety Officer for the Department of Pharmacology. He is also a founding member and participant of the Medical School Transition Year Programme, and has been on review panels for the Provost’s Teaching Award and CAPSL Learning Innovation Project Awards.

During the course of his research, he has collaborated with research groups in the UK, Europe, USA and China, and is a peer reviewer for over 25 international journals. He has given several invited lectures based upon his research, and innovative teaching. He is actively engaged in outreach to Dublin schools as part of the transition year programme run by the School of Medicine.

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Irene Walsh

irene-walshProfessor Irene Walsh is Assistant Professor at the Department of Clinical Speech & Language Studies (CSLS), within the School of Linguistics, Speech and Communication Sciences. She joined Trinity College Dublin in 1993 and holds the following degrees all from Trinity College Dublin: PhD (2002); MPhil Ling (Theoretical Linguistics) (1992); BA Rem Ling (Remedial Linguistics) (1982).

Professor Walsh teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate courses within the department, engaging in joint and interdisciplinary teaching within a Problem Based Learning Curriculum. The main modules she contributes to include: Assessment in Language and Communication (SF) and Intervention in Language and Communication (JS). She is responsible for the co‐ordination of the interdisciplinary module, Interactive Discourse Analysis (a 48-hour module), which she teaches with a colleague to SF Deaf Studies students and JS Clinical Speech and Language students together.
At a PG level, Professor Walsh teaches primarily on the Developmental Language Disability Strand, while also being involved in teaching common modules for other groups of PG students.

Professor Walsh’s workload amounts to approximately 120 (timetabled) hours per year; her supervision of undergraduate dissertations in the final year and Postgraduate Students (not timetabled) amounts to 135‐160 hours approximately per year (depending on numbers of students). She also undertakes some clinical work and carries administrative responsibilities in the department.

3 students to date have completed PhDs under Dr Walsh’s supervision (1 student was awarded in December 2011 and 2 are awaiting final examiners’ reports, post viva voce); a further 3 students are currently being supervised by her (one of whom is being jointly supervised by Professor June Nunn from the School of Dental Science). A number of taught and research Masters’ students are also supervised by Professor Walsh.
Professor Walsh was centrally involved in bringing about 2 major developments in the undergraduate course in CSLS:
(i) the introduction of a Problem Based Learning Curriculum (PBL) in the early 2000s, when the course was completely restructured and redesigned, both academically and clinically.
(ii) the introduction and ongoing development of the Interactive Discourse Analysis (DA) module. Aside from developing the developmental and institutional discourse elements of this course (rarely covered by similar UG programmes in the field), Professor Walsh has also demonstrated leadership in incorporating this module into the Bachelor in Deaf Studies (a recently developed degree programme which she helped to design and implement as Director of Teaching and Learning at the time). The number of students using DA methodologies in their final year dissertations, and at postgraduate level to PhD, is testament to the success of this module at undergraduate level.

Professor Walsh received a commendation for a Provost’s Teaching Award in 2012. She was appointed a College Tutor in 2003 and continued in this role until 2007 when she was appointed Director of Teaching and Learning (Undergraduate), a post she held for 4 years, up to 2011. She regularly takes on the role of Acting Head of Discipline, and is currently in this role for Michaelmas Term 2012‐2013. In addition, she has been Open Day Co‐ordinator for the past few years.

Professor Walsh’s main research theme is ‘Children and adults with psychiatric disorders and communication impairment: Prevalence and processes’. She is keen to identify prevalence and to describe and explain the nature of the language and communication difficulties of people with psychiatric disorders (e.g. schizophrenia, attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome), in order to help dispel the myths and challenge beliefs that such difficulties are merely “part of the diagnosis” and hence not amenable to intervention from a speech and language therapist (SLT), during diagnosis and rehabilitation.

Professor Walsh’s main research success has been in the area of Adult Psychiatric Disorders and the provision of Speech & Language Therapy (SLT) within the Irish context. A needs analysis study led by her resulted in the establishment (in 2006) of a Clinical Specialist in Speech and Language Therapy in Adult Mental Health ‐the first SLT to work in this area of practice in the Republic of Ireland. The study was published in 2007 in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine. Many other publications arose from this research in reputable journals and in edited volumes. This research success has spawned other needs analysis’ studies, undertaken on foot of invitations from leading psychiatric teaching hospitals in Ireland (Mater Hospital) and in the UK (Surrey and Borders Partnership, NHS).  A consequent benefit from this work has been the demystification of the nature of the communication presentation of these disorders, thereby helping to reduce the stigmatisation of this frequently misunderstood clinical population. Her research has also ensured that the SLT role is now considered core to multidisciplinary teams, with its importance recognised by service users and their families.

Additionally, recording and transcribing spoken interactions among people with psychiatric disorders and SLTs allow for descriptions of the processes at work in face‐to‐face interactions (i.e. how people engage and co‐operate in therapy). Therefore, Professor Walsh’s research focuses both on the science of SLT intervention in delineating impairments, and at the same time focuses on the art of therapeutic interaction from participants’ perspectives. Such work then, in turn, informs healthcare discourse in general and how communication can be improved upon and enhanced in practice.

Professor Walsh has published 12 peer‐reviewed articles and 12 book chapters (with the total number of publications at 31, including non‐peer review articles and conference proceedings).

In July 2004, Professor Walsh was invited to present her research to the patron of the Royal College of Psychiatrists ‐ HRH Princess Anne ‐ at their annual meeting at Harrogate (UK). She is a member of the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists (IASLT) (of which she was a board member for 4 years and editor of the Association’s journal for 15 years); she is also a member of the American Speech and Hearing Association, and a past member of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Professor Walsh actively promotes Trinity in her research and teaching on national and international stages. In particular, she markets her work in SLT and Adult Mental Health as a Trinity‐led initiative and achievement.

Professor Walsh has hosted 2 International Round Tables at Trinity (in 2006 and 2010) bringing together leading experts in the field of Clinical Discourse Analysis from Ireland, UK and USA. She has also presented on an annual basis at conferences in the USA and taught on some UG programmes there (University of Rhode Island), and in Europe (University of Malta). Most recently on a national basis, Professor Walsh has acted as a consultant for the development of SLT services in Mental Health, meeting with the HSE Assistant National Director for Mental Health (in August, 2012). On an international basis, she has acted as a consultant in co‐ordinating and carrying out a needs analysis for the Surrey and Borders Partnership (NHS)(in June 2012). She is currently on an IASLT working party to establish National Standards of Practice for SLT in Mental Health Services. Her outreach activities include support for researchers, clinicians, service users and families within psychiatric services.

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Frank Wellmer

frank-wellmerProfessor Frank Wellmer was awarded a PhD in Biology, summa cum laude, from the University of Freiburg (Germany) in 1998, a MSc in Biology from the University of Osnabrück (Germany) in 1995 and received postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology (USA) from 1999 to 2006. He joined Trinity College in September 2006, in the Plant Developmental Genetics Laboratory, Smurfit Institute of Genetics.

Professor Wellmer lectures courses for Junior and Senior Sophister students in Genomics and Systems Biology, Molecular Genetics Techniques, and Plant Developmental Genetics. He gives Genetics tutorials for Junior Sophister students and Genetics practicals for Senior Freshman students.
2 students have completed PhD degrees under his supervision, two additional students completed research master’s theses and 5 PhD students are currently being supervised.

He has designed curricula or new modules as follows:
• Development and coordination of BY2208 Genetics practicals for Senior Freshman students
and of Genetics tutorials for Junior Sophister students
• Development of lecture courses in Genomics & Systems Biology, Molecular Genetics Techniques, and Plant Developmental Genetics
• Design of a new curriculum for Genetics as part of the School’s teaching committee

Professor Wellmer’s research aims at understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying plant development. His group focuses on 2 specific areas: the formation of flowers and the role of protein degradation in plant growth and development. His group’s research in both of these areas has been published in leading international scientific journals and is well cited, indicating an immediate impact on the field.

Professor Wellmer has 25 peer reviewed articles, including papers in journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, Science and PNAS. He has a total number of citations of 1,143 and a current h-index of 16. His total grant income as Principal Investigator is in excess of €2m. Fellowships from EMBO, IRCSET and SFI have been awarded to laboratory members.

Professor Wellmer was awarded a Science Foundation Ireland Principal Investigator (since 2007), a California Institute of Technology postdoctoral fellowship (1999-2001); Emmy Noether postdoctoral fellowship of the German Research Council (1999-2001); Hans Grisebach PhD thesis award of the University of Freiburg (1999) and a PhD fellowship of the German Research Council (1996-1998).

Professor Wellmer is a member of the teaching committee of the School of Genetics and Microbiology since 2011. Since 2007 he has been course advisor and coordinator for Genetics. He was responsible for  timetabling all teaching activities in Genetics  from 2007-2011. He acts as mentor to a SFI Starting Investigator Research Grant awardee (2009-2013). He established and managed a genomics facility in the Smurfit Institute (2007-2012). In 2011 he represented Trinity as a member of an SFI-led delegation to India.

Professor Wellmer collaborates with research groups from Brazil, France, Germany, India, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, UK and USA. He is a member of the council of the Federation of European Societies of Plant Biology (2012-2014). He was a member of the local organising committee for the Plant Biology Congress 2014, Dublin. He is a member of steering committee for the European Networking Summer School in Plant Genomics and Bioinformatics (European Science Foundation) (2008-2012). He was involved in the establishment of PlantResearchIreland.org website as a platform for Irish plant scientists and was a founding member of the Irish Plant Science Association. He is reviewer of research grants for various funding agencies and peer-reviewer of manuscripts for various journals, eg Nature, Plant Cell, Plant Journal. He has presented at numerous research institutes and international meetings. He has been interviewed by several newspapers and magazines about the research of the laboratory.

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Last updated 24 October 2012 Vice-Provost / Chief Academic Officer (Email).

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