Trinity Monday 2020 - Fellows and Scholars

• Three Honorary Fellows
• Four Professorial Fellows
• Fourteen New Fellows
• Fifty Seven New Scholars

Trinity College Dublin was founded as a corporation consisting of the Provost, the Fellows and the Scholars. Scholars are elected annually in various subjects on the result of an examination held in Trinity term. Scholarship or research achievement of a high order is the primary qualification for Fellowship, coupled with evidence of the candidate's contribution to the academic life of the College and an effective record in teaching.

Traditionally, the election of new Fellows and Scholars is announced by the Provost on Trinity Monday (20 April 2020) at 10.00 a.m. from the steps of the Public Theatre. Three Honorary Fellows, Four Professorial Fellows, Fourteen New Fellows and Fifty Seven New Scholars were elected this morning.

Honorary Fellowship

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROVISION IN SECTION 11 OF THE CHAPTER ON THE FELLOWS IN THE 2010 CONSOLIDATED STATUTES, THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN ELECTED TO HONORARY FELLOWSHIP:

• Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell
• Professor John Fitzgerald
• Mr Neil Mendoza

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Jocelyn Bell Burnell inadvertently discovered pulsars as a graduate student in Cambridge in radio astronomy, opening up a new branch of astrophysics. She has subsequently worked in many roles in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family, and is now an Academic Visitor in the University of Oxford. She was a Pro-Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin between 2013 and 2018. Much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster, in her spare time she gardens, listens to choral music and is an active Quaker.

Professor John Fitzgerald

Professor John Fitzgerald is the Chair of the Climate Change Advisory Council. He is an adjunct professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin and an adjunct professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering UCD. He is a former research professor and currently a research affiliate at the Economic and Social Research Institute. Professor FitzGerald is also a member of the Commission of the Central Bank of Ireland, and is a member of the governance board of both the UCD Energy Institute and UCD iCRAG.

Mr Neil Mendoza

Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, following a career building businesses in the creative and finance sectors. At Oxford he is also on the board of the Ashmolean Museum and chairs the electors for the Slade Professorship of Fine Art. In the heritage sector he is Chair of The Landmark Trust and the Illuminated River Foundation, and has recently stepped down as a Commissioner at Historic England. He is a non-Executive Director at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport focussing on the UK’s cultural sectors and led and continues to implement the Mendoza Review of Museums in England (2017).

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Professorial Fellowship

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROVISION IN SECTION 7 OF THE CHAPTER ON THE FELLOWS IN THE 2010 CONSOLIDATED STATUTES, THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN ELECTED TO PROFESSORIAL FELLOWSHIP:

• Ruth Mazo Karras (Professor)
• Andrew Murphy (Professor)
• Joseph Keane (Professor)
• Ahuvia Kahane (Professor)

Ruth Mazo Karras (Professor)

Ruth Mazo Karras (BA Yale, MPhil Oxon, PhD Yale) came to Trinity from the University of Minnesota. Ruth’s areas of interest within medieval European history concern the way people understood their own identities and those of others and constructed gender categories. Her From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Later Medieval Europe was the first monograph dealing with medieval masculinities. Her forthcoming book deals with King David in medieval Christian and Jewish cultures. She is also the author of Sexuality in Medieval Europe; Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia; Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England; and Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in Medieval Europe.

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Andrew Murphy (Professor)

Andrew Murphy studied English and Psychology at Trinity, before going on to complete an MA and PhD at Brandeis University in Boston. He worked for four years at the University of Hertfordshire, then moved to the University of St Andrews, where he worked for twenty years, serving at various points as Head of the School of English, Director of the Graduate School and Provost of St Leonard's College. His most recent monograph is Ireland, Reading and Cultural Nationalism, 1790-1930 (2018). His Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, first published in 2003, will be issued in a revised and expanded second edition later this year.

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Joseph Keane (Professor)

Joseph Keane is the Professor of Medicine and Consultant Respiratory Physician at Trinity Saint James's Hospital. He grew up in Co. Clare and graduated from Trinity in 1988. He then trained in Dublin and Boston, and he was appointed here as lecturer/consultant in 2002. He served as director of research in the School of Medicine and head of Department, before his recent appointment to the Trinity 1955 Chair of Medicine. Professor Keane co-leads tuberculosis elimination efforts at the Saint James's National Center. His research contributions to the field include the definitive report of the association of tuberculosis with biological treatments. He was the inaugural holder (2007), and successfully renewed (2012), the HRB clinician scientist award. His research group is funded by the HRB, the Royal City of Dublin Hospital Trust, and the IRC.

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Ahuvia Kahane (Professor)

Ahuvia Kahane obtained a DPhil from Balliol College, Oxford. He joined Trinity College Dublin in Sept. 2019 and has held positions at Oxford, Harvard, Northwestern, and Royal, Holloway University of London. Ahuvia’s research explores poetic, historical, linguistic, scientific and ethical aspects of formal order, exceptionality and ‘complexity’ in antiquity. He studies the relationship between antiquity and modernity, aspects of temporality, historical time and literary history and is committed to both disciplinary and interdisciplinary enquiry. Ahuvia has published widely on ancient literature and culture, visual cultures, sociology, lexicography, Hebrew studies, modern poetry, digital humanities, and contemporary critical thought. Ahuvia is married to Georgina and has three children, Berenike, Erasmus and Lysander.

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Fellowship

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROVISION IN SECTION 7 OF THE CHAPTER ON THE FELLOWS IN THE 2010 CONSOLIDATED STATUTES,THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN ELECTED TO FELLOWSHIP:

• Conor Buckley (Associate Professor)
• Brian Caulfield (Associate Professor)
• Catherine Comiskey (Professor In)
• Sarah Doyle (Assistant Professor)
• Na Fu (Associate Professor)
• Giuseppe Mazziotti (Assistant Professor)
• Aidan McDonald (Associate Professor)
• Rachel McDonnell (Assistant Professor)
• Tim Persoons (Assistant Professors)
• Helen Sheridan (Associate Professor)
• Plamen Stamenov (Assistant Professor)
• Lidia Tajber (Associate Professor)
• Etain Tannam (Associate Professor)
• Robert Whelan (Associate Professor)

Conor Buckley (Associate Professor)

Conor Buckley is Director- Biomedical Engineering, Principal investigator (PI) in the Trinity Centre for Biomedical Engineering and the Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research (AMBER) Centre at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on novel biomaterials, biofabrication and cell-based strategies for tissue regeneration (https://www.tcd.ie/bioengineering/regenerative/buckleylab/). Buckley has received funding in the areas of biomaterials, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine as PI (>€3.5million) and as co-investigator (>€10.45million). He has published 70 international peer reviewed journal articles and over 180 conference publications. Prof. Buckley also founded the Med3DP initiative (www.med3dp.com) to develop medical devices for humanitarian healthcare using 3D printing technology. Buckley is also PI on several commercial projects developing biomaterials for peripheral nerve repair (Integra Life Sciences) and bioprinting for next generation implantable devices and tissues for orthopaedic applications (Johnson & Johnson). He recently received a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator award to develop personalised medicine approaches to regenerating the intervertebral disc.

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Brian Caulfield (Associate Professor)

Brian Caulfield is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering. His research focuses on transport and sustainable mobility and he has been an active member in several large projects which have examined transport usage behavioural change and measured transport emissions. Dr Caulfield’s research measures the impacts of sustainable transport policies by modelling large datasets which are collected using surveys and remote sensors. He has been active in transport research for over 10 years, and has published over 120 journal and conference papers. In 2017, he addressed the Irish Citizens Assembly on Climate Change, providing evidence on low carbon transport options for Ireland. He is currently advising the Climate Change Advisory Council on pathways to decreasing transport emissions by 2030.

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Catherine Comiskey (Professor In)

Professor Comiskey holds a MA and a B.A.(Mod) degree in Mathematics and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin University, Ireland and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in biomathematics with statistics and epidemiology from Dublin City University, Ireland. Professor Comiskey has over 20 years research and lecturing experience in statistics and mathematics applied to healthcare and her personal research interests are in substance use, child wellbeing and innovation. From 2017 to present Professor Comiskey was elected by EU members as Vice Chair of the Scientific Committee of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, a committee with a legal remit from the EU. In 2014 Prof Comiskey was selected after an EU wide competition to serve as an EU expert on the Scientific Committee of the EU's European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Portugal. From 2017 to present she was invited by Minister Byrne to be the sole academic expert on the National Drug Strategy Implementation Committee. From 2014 to 2017 she was invited by Minister Varadkar to serve on the Oversight Forum on Drugs. From 2014 to 2017 she was invited by Minister White to Chair the National Advisory Committee on Drugs and Alcohol. In 2007 to 2010 she was appointed by Minister of Education and Science to serve on the board of The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology, (IRCSET). Catherine has served as Head of School (2014-2017), Director of Research (2008-2011 and 2011-2014), Inaugural Director and Founder of the Trinity Centre for Practice and Healthcare Innovation (TCPHI)(2014-2017), Inaugural and Founding Chair of the Children's Research Network of Ireland and Northern Ireland CRNINI (2010-2014) and Professor in Healthcare Statistics at the School of Nursing and Midwifery (2008-present).

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Sarah Doyle (Assistant Professor)

Dr. Sarah Doyle is an Assistant Professor in Immunology and an Irish Research Council (IRC) Laureate. She studied signalling pathways downstream of innate immune Pattern Recognition Receptors (PRRs) under the supervision of Prof. Luke O’Neill for her PhD, which was awarded in 2007 by the Dept. of Biochemistry, TCD. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Science Foundation Ireland's (SFI) Immunology Research Cluster she was awarded a travel fellowship to work between TCD and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) on PRR regulation of endosomal trafficking. Since obtaining her faculty position in the School of Medicine in 2012, Dr. Doyle’s lab has focused on researching PRR and Toll/IL-1R (TIR)-super family signalling in progressive retinal degenerative disease. She is currently funded by research grants from SFI, HRB and the IRC. In 2019 she was awarded the prestigious Milstein ICIS Young Investigator Award for contribution to cytokine and interferon research.

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Na Fu (Associate Professor)

Na Fu (PhD in strategic human resource management) is an Associate Professor and Director for MSc in Human Resource Management at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin. She is the Director of MSc Human Resource Management, a triple-accredited programme and the Digital Workplace Lead at the Trinity Centre for Digital Business. As a recipient of multi-awards in research and teaching, Professor Fu is passionate about helping organisations to achieve their employee’s full potential in all aspects. She has led a number of research projects in both the private and public sectors around people management relevant to organisational growth and development. Her recent work includes organisational digital transformation in particularly human resource management.

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Giuseppe Mazziotti (Assistant Professor)

Giuseppe Mazziotti is an Italian law professor specializing in intellectual property, antitrust, EU law, media and Internet policies. He worked and held research positions at European and U.S. universities such as UC Berkeley, University of Copenhagen, Roma Tre University, Columbia University, Harvard and New York University (NYU). Since October 2014 he has been an Assistant Professor in Intellectual Property Law at Trinity College Dublin. Giuseppe’s work emphasises how digital technologies have altered the conditions and economics of content creation and distribution and enhanced free expression and communications. He is currently investigating the effects of the European Union’s Digital Single Market on copyright and media law and the emergence of genuinely pan-European audiences. In 2018/2019 Giuseppe was awarded an EU Fulbright Schuman Innovation Grant to develop a research project on copyright, social media and remuneration of content creators at NYU School of Law.

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Aidan McDonald (Associate Professor)

Aidan is an Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry. Aidan received a B.A. in Chemistry from TCD in 2002 and completed Ph.D. studies at the University of Utrecht in 2008. Following that he performed postdoctoral research at the University of Minnesota. Aidan returned to TCD in 2012 as an Assistant Professor. Aidan was previously a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein fellow and a Marie Curie fellow, and currently holds both an ERC Starting Grant and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He was recently honoured with the award of the Royal Society of Chemistry Sir Edward Frankland Fellowship. Aidan’s research group focuses on the field of Biological Inorganic Chemistry, a field that explores the roles metals play in Biology. His group investigates the role of manganese in DNA synthesis and repair as well as the potential of biomimetic iron, nickel, and copper systems for the design of new man-made catalysts.

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Rachel McDonnell (Associate Professor)

Dr. Rachel McDonnell is an Associate Professor in Creative Technologies at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin. She received her PhD in Computer Graphics at Trinity College Dublin in 2006 on the topic of character animation and visual perception. Her research interests include computer graphics, virtual reality, virtual humans, and perceptually-adaptive graphics. Her particular focus is on improving humanness in virtual embodied agents. She has secured more than €1.5M in research funding from SFI, EI, and H2020. She has published over 70 papers in the top conferences and journals in her field and has a h-index of 23. She has also served as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and for the Journal of Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics.

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Tim Persoons (Assistant Professor)

Dr. Tim Persoons is Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Trinity College Dublin since 2013, and Visiting Faculty in the NSF I/UCRC Cooling Technologies Research Center at Purdue University since 2009. He received his Doctorate in Engineering at KU Leuven in 2006 and his MSc in Mechanical Engineering at KU Leuven in 1999. Tim’s research focuses on thermal management of electronics systems, from cooling micro-scale devices to waste heat recuperation and sustainable energy system integration of data centres. He has secured more than €2.4M in research funding from SFI, IRC, EI, H2020, with about 30% of co-funding from industry partners. His 140+ journal and conference publications have attracted over 1,500 citations (h-index 19). He is Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. Compon. Packag. Manuf. Technol. and Exp. Therm. Fluid Sci., scientific committee member for several leading conferences, and is organising the 2021 THERMINIC conference in Dublin.

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Helen Sheridan (Associate Professor)

Helen Sheridan is an Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. She is co-founder of the TCD ‘NatPro’ Centre (2019) and co-founder of the TCD Drug Discovery Campus Company ‘Trino Therapeutics’ (2000). Helen’s research interests lie in Natural Product Chemistry, Drug Discovery and Ethnopharmacology. One of her most significant achievements is the progression of a drug from discovery to Phase 1 Human Clinical trials. Helen has recently received funding (€6M) for a bioprospecting study entitled ‘Unlocking Nature’s Pharmacy from bog land species’, targeted at identifying molecules with potential therapeutic/commercial potential, capable of impacting positively on the economy of the bog land regions. The driving force behind Helen’s work is to address unmet clinical need and to find meaningful uses for natural molecules. The projects Helen’s group are working on have therapeutic and commercial potential. Her research has secured over €19M funding to date.

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Plamen Stamenov (Assistant Professor)

Dr. Plamen Stamenov received a BSc degree from the University of Sofia (Bulgaria) in Theoretical and Experimental Physics in 2002, with research work on the magnetic and structural properties of some manganese perovskites. He completed his PhD research in 2007 under the supervision of Prof. J. M. D. Coey in Trinity College Dublin. This research focused on metals, semimetals and semiconductors for spin electronics applications. After completing his PhD, he stayed on in Trinity College as a research fellow and teaching assistant within the School of Physics and CRANN conducting research in the field of spin-dependent transport, and collaborating with industry in applied magnetics and microwave technology. In 2010, Dr. Stamenov became an Ussher Lecturer in Physics and Principal Investigator within CRANN in the area of nanomagnetism.

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Lidia Tajber (Associate Professor)

Lidia Tajber received her MPharm degree from Medical University of Silesia, Poland, and PhD from Trinity, where she is now an Associate Professor in Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology and Director of Research in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. She joined the School in 2007 as a lecturer. Lidia has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts, contributed to numerous international conference presentations and is a co-inventor on patent applications. Her current h-index is 31. Lidia's research activities fit with national policy objectives supporting the development and production of a highly educated and relevant workforce in demand by the pharmaceutical industry. She has successfully participated in collaborative, multidisciplinary and industry-led research consortia funded by SFI and European Commission (Horizon2020) leading to high impact research. The ultimate objective of her work is to advance the pharmaceutical product design and manufacture to benefit the general public and enhance the quality of health.

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Etain Tannam (Associate Professor)

Etain Tannam (BA, Trinity College Dublin, MA University of Essex, PhD, LSE) is Associate Professor International Peace Studies, Trinity College Dublin. Her main area of expertise is Irish/Northern cross-border cooperation and British-Irish intergovernmental/diplomatic cooperation, with emphasis on Brexit's impact. She is currently writing a book British-Irish Relations in the 21st Century, 2020, forthcoming, Oxford, Oxford University Press. She has contributed to various reports about Brexit, including the European Parliament, JURIS Committee, the House of Commons, Select Committee for Northern Ireland and the House of Lords Brexit Inquiry. She has also appeared on BBC Radio 4, SKY News and RTE. She is author of International Intervention in Ethnic Conflict: A Comparison of the European Union and United Nations (2014, Basingstoke, Palgrave) and Cross-Border Co-operation in Ireland (1999, Basingstoke, Palgrave) and has published various book chapters and international journal articles (see below). Her research interests are in the areas of Northern Ireland and British-Irish relations, including the impact of Brexit, international organizations and conflict resolution, United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU) politics.

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Robert Whelan (Associate Professor)

Robert Whelan is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and the Global Brain Health Institute. My research answers clinically relevant questions, using both structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, high-density electroencephalography and behavioural assays. Many of my projects can be placed under the rubric of ‘Big Data’. I have published over 150 papers, including first-author papers in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and Biological Psychiatry. Recent senior-author papers include those published in NeuroImage (2019, 2018), Addiction Biology (2020, 2019), Clinical Neurophysiology (2020) and Human Brain Mapping (2019). I have co-authored recently in other high-impact journals: for example, JAMA Psychiatry (2019x2, 2018, 2016 & 2015), eLife (in press, 2019, 2016) and a large multi-consortium paper in Science (in press). I have been awarded over €3.3 million in competitive funding as PI, from sources such as the Health Research Board, Science Foundation Ireland, and a Young Investigator award from the Brain and Behavior Foundation.

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Scholarship

THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN ELECTED TO SCHOLARSHIP 2020: