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.
Prof. Neale Gibson and Prof. Kate Maguire were elected to fellowship.
Neale Gibson is an astrophysicist in the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin. Originally from Belfast, he did his undergraduate degree and PhD at Queen’s University Belfast, followed by postdoctoral positions at the University of Oxford and the European Southern Observatory (Garching, Germany), where he was also a support astronomer for the Very Large Telescope. He was then awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and returned to Queen’s as a Lecturer in 2015, before joining Trinity in 2019. His work focuses on extrasolar planets - planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. In particular, he uses world-leading observing facilities to peer into the atmospheres of these planets in an effort to understand their compositions and physical properties. His work focusses on developing new statistical techniques to efficiently extract and model tiny atmospheric signals from complex datasets, with the long term goal of characterising 'Earth-like' planets in detail.
Kate Maguire is a Professor in Astrophysics in the School of Physics, and she leads a group studying explosive astrophysical phenomena, such as supernovae, gravitational-wave counterparts, and exotic extra-galactic transients. She joined the academic staff at Trinity in 2019 from Queen’s University Belfast, where she was a lecturer and STFC Ernest Rutherford Advanced Fellow. Prior to this, she was a Marie Curie and ESO fellow at the European Southern Observatory and spent time as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford. She obtained her PhD in astrophysics from Queen’s University Belfast. She has been awarded an ERC Starting grant (2017) and ERC Consolidator grant (2023) for her research into the explosive endpoints of stellar evolution. Understanding these explosions is essential for determining the origin of the elements, as well as the fundamentals of the ‘Dark Universe’, in particular constraining the properties of the mysterious quantity dark energy through next-generation observational measurements.
In addition, the School’s Physical Sciences students Erasmo Marcozzi was elected to scholarship in 2024.
The School would also like to congratulate Prof. Peter Gallagher on his election to Honorary Fellowship.
Prof. Gallagher is Head of Astrophysics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and Director of DIAS Dunsink Observatory. He has a long association with College, having been a Professor of Physics, Director of the Physics & Astrophysics Moderatorship and Associate Dean of Research. Professor Gallagher lead the installation of the LOFAR radio telescope at Birr Castle and is involved in numerous ESA and NASA space missions to study the Sun. He holds a BSc in Physics & Mathematics from University College Dublin and an MSc and a PhD in Physics from Queen's University Belfast, and was a Research Fellow at Owens Valley Solar Array and Big Bear Solar Observatory in California and at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. He is a co-founder of the Astronomical Observatories of Ireland, a cross-border initiative to build closer links between Armagh, Birr and Dunsink. Professor Gallagher was invested as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes académiques in 2017.
See full details of the announcement here.