New Fellows' Dinner
Dining Hall
20th October
Good evening, and welcome,
We have arrived again at this important time, early in the new academic year, when we welcome our new Fellows at a dinner hosted by the Senior Common Room.
Traditionally the names of the new Fellows are read out from the steps of the Public Theatre, in dramatic fashion on Trinity Monday. Then, at this dinner we welcome each new Fellow by name, position, and research specialisation. This is our opportunity to welcome the new Fellows collectively and to get a sense of the distinction each one brings to the College.
As you know, Trinity was founded as a corporation consisting of the Provost, Fellows and Scholars. So the singular dignity of Fellowship is as old as the College itself.
Fellows are elected by other Fellows on the basis of serious scholarly work of international standing, and once elected, they have a central role in the governance of the College. To our Fellows falls the great task of moulding the College’s distinctive traditions in each new generation.
The first three Fellows elected in 1592 were theologians. Over the following centuries, the number and diversity of Fellows increased - as scholarship in Trinity became ever more rich, varied, versatile, and international. From the small, distinctive 17th century college of British and Irish male theologians, Trinity is now a large, global, multidisciplinary university.
Tonight we recognise ten new Fellows, and four new Professorial Fellows. I think it’s worth saying that these comprise eight men and six women. I had rather it were seven and seven – and last year there were more women than men – so currently these figures represent a great improvement on centuries of male only. Some data presented at Board on Wednesday this week shows that, just nine years ago, in 2008, the proportion of male to female fellows was 80:20 whereas now in 2017 it is 68:32. Still a long way to go to parity but the rate of convergence is increasing.
Tonight we also welcome our new honorary fellow. Professor Roy Foster needs no introduction. A graduate of this university, he is among the best-known and most critically acclaimed of Irish historians. The elegance of his prose style; the range of his research, literary as well as historical; and his fearlessness in attacking received positions has secured him a wide readership, beyond academic circles. As the first Carroll Irish Professor of Irish History at Oxford, and now Professor of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary University in London, he has been an important interpreter of Irish history in the UK. His support of Trinity through the decades, his willingness to give lectures here and his role in the establishment of the Long Room Hub are particularly appreciated. It’s a privilege to welcome him to his alma mater as an Honorary Fellow.
It’s now my honour to introduce each new Fellow, by name, position, and research specialisation.
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Ursula Fearon is Arthritis Ireland Professor of Molecular Rheumatology in the School of Medicine and the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute. Her research – for which she has won several national and international awards - is a bench-to-bedside translational approach, focusing on understanding the underlying mechanisms that drive disease pathogenesis. The recipient of extensive research funding from national and international bodies, she has developed several novel models for the study of innovative medicines in the field of rheumatology and immunology and has established strong collaborative research networks across Europe, USA and Singapore, as well as industry partnerships.
Brendan Kelly is Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin and Consultant Psychiatrist at Tallaght Hospital. He has authored and co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications and 400 non-peer-reviewed publications, and in addition to his medical degree and doctorate, he holds masters degrees in epidemiology, healthcare management and Buddhist studies, and doctorates in history, governance and law. He has drawn on his very wide range of expertise to publish six books in the past four years on history, mental health law and human rights.
Michael Morris is the Director of SFI Research Centre AMBER and Professor of Surface and Interface Chemistry at Trinity. He has worked in the area of self-assembly for over 20 years, publishing over 300 papers, and his research into self-assembly methods has been used to develop key industry technologies in fields such as chromatography and nanoelectronics. He has key collaborators at Intel, Merck and Johnson and Johnson and is co-founder of Glantreo, a company supplying chromatography materials to industry.
Valeria Nicolosi is the Professor of Nanomaterials and Advanced Microscopy in the School of Chemistry, and a Principal Investigator in CRANN and the SFI Centre AMBER. She has published more than 150 high-impact-papers and won numerous awards including the RDS/Intel Prize for Nanoscience 2012, World Economic Forum Young Scientist 2013, SFI President of Ireland Young Researcher Award 2014, SFI Irish Early Stage Researcher 2016. She is top European Research Council Awardee in Ireland and one of the top in Europe, having won ERC awards to date.
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Raj Chari is a professor in Political Science. His research is centred on comparative public policy, with a focus on the regulation of lobbyists from a global comparative perspective, the relationship between business and politics, and EU competition policy. He has also written on electoral behaviour and party politics. He has advised governments and institutions in Ireland and internationally on lobbying regulation and the development of lobbying laws. His most recent book Life After Privatization is published by Oxford University Press.
Imelda Coyne is Professor in Children’s Nursing and a co-director of the Trinity Research in Childhood Centre (TRiCC), which she helped establish. Her research focuses on child and family centred care, shared decision-making, and chronic illness management for children and families. She has undertaken policy-relevant research for government bodies and is the co-author of more than 300 research articles, books, book chapters, letters, and abstracts. She currently holds the Alva Myrdal Professorship at Malardalen University in Sweden.
Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott Associate Professor in American history. His work explores the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the twentieth-century United States. His latest book isBeyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy and he has published journal articles on a range of topics including the antifascist movement in 1930s California, the relationship of liberalism to the New Left, the reactions of Southern segregationists to European decolonization, and the music and prison activism of country singer Johnny Cash.
Naomi Harte is an Associate Professor in Digital Media Systems in the School of Engineering and a co-Principal Investigator in the SFI ADAPT centre. She has explored topics in human speech communication. Her principal areas of focus are audio visual speech processing, speaker ageing, emotion in speech, speech quality, and bird song analysis. In 2015, she was a visiting Professor at ISCI in Berkeley USA. She holds technology patents and licences through her collaboration with Google in the United States.
Laure Marignol is associate professor in Radiation Therapy, and leads the applied radiation therapy research group. Laure is the first ever Fellow of the College form her discipline of Radiation Therapy. The radiobiology lab she has developed in Trinity addresses the international challenge of the optimal management of prostate cancer patients – including detecting patients at high risk of failure following radiation, and designing new therapeutic options that prevent tumour regrowth. She has served on the committees of Radiation Research Societies in the USA, UK and Ireland and sits on the Radiobiology Committee of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology.
Bernice Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the School of English, and director of the M.Phil in Popular Literature. Her books include The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture and The Highway Horror Film and, most recently, the textbook Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction. She is the co-founder of the online Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and is a founding member of the recently established Irish Network for Gothic Studies.
Redmond O’Connell is Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and a principal investigator at TCIN, the Trinity Institute of Neuroscience. He holds an adjunct Senior Research Fellowship at Monash University in Australia. His research focuses on exposing the neural principles and processes that underpin both normal and abnormal decision making. His research is funded by the US National Science Foundation, The Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Australian Research Council and the European Research Council.
Alan O’Connor is Associate Professor in Civil Engineering. A Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, he is a research leader in the probabilistic life cycle assessment of civil infrastructure. His research group in Trinity is focused on risk analysis of critical infrastructure networks for extreme weather events and natural hazards and on resilience assessment of critical infrastructure networks. He has authored over 170 academic papers, including over 60 peer-reviewed in international journals.
Stefan Sint is an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics. His research focuses on elementary particle physics, in particular Quantum Chromo-Dynamics, the theory underlying the strong nuclear force. Numerical simulations are used to obtain precise quantitative predictions of fundamental parameters such as the quark gluon coupling or the quark masses, which are required for precision tests of the so-called Standard Model of elementary particle physics.
Martin Sokol is Associate Professor in Geography in the School of Natural Sciences. He is an economic geographer with interest in urban and regional development, geographies of knowledge economies, post-socialist transformations and geographies of finance. A founding member and Secretary of the Global Network on Financial Geography, and a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association, he was recently awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for his project GEOFIN - Western Banks in Eastern Europe: New Geographies of Financialisation.
I congratulate all our new Fellows. Each of you has achieved so much – both here in Trinity, and elsewhere. I am sorry that I have only had time to ‘gallop’ through your career highs. Each of you could merit a speech of your own. We are very proud that you have chosen to enhance this university through your research and teaching and we look forward to the continuance and deepening of our relationship with you.
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