PResident's RePORt 2009/2010 - University College Cork

Foreword
UCC at a Glance
Academic Developments
Teaching and Learning
Research
College Reports:
Arts, Celtic
Studies and Social
Sciences
Business and Law
Medicine and Health
Science, Engineering and
Food Science
Events
Student Experience
Sports and Recreation
Buildings and Estates
Cork University Press
Finance
Governing Body
IRIS Appendix
17
grants to the value of €3.7m. Seven UCC projects benefited
from over €1m of funding under SFI’s 2010 Research Frontier
Programme. UCC was the most successful institution in Ireland
in securing postgraduate scholarship awards from the Irish
Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology in
2010 with UCC students winning 32 of the 132 scholarships
awarded nationally.
UCC researchers continue to successfully exploit non-Exchequer
sources of funding. Dr Robert Ryan and Dr Max Dow, BIOMERIT
Research Centre (Microbiology) received a combined grant of
€400,000 from the Wellcome Trust. This award will fund the use
of state-of-the-art techniques in protein expression and structure
determination in combination with genetic and biochemical
approaches to study how bacteria respond to environmental
stimuli to cause disease. 20 new research jobs were also created
at the Tyndall National Institute (TNI) following the award of
€8m from Europe’s Framework Programme 7 (FP7) for cuttingedge
research in telecommunications, nanoelectronics, medical
devices and environmental monitoring.
The university continued to promote local and national economic
development by interacting proactively with industry and
business through collaborative research initiatives throughout
2009/2010. In March 2010, TNI was awarded €10m to host two
of the five initial industry-led Competence Centres – Applied
Nanotechnology and Microelectronics – which will work on
industry-relevant research to boost the competitiveness of
businesses in Ireland in the pharmaceutical, electronics,
medical and microchip circuit design markets. In April 2010,
it was announced that a new International Energy Research
Centre (IERC) will be established at TNI and, as a direct result
of IERC’s establishment, the major American multi-national,
United Technologies Corporation, will establish a new research
facility creating 37 new jobs over the next four years through a
€15m investment. Government funding for the IERC will be up
to €20m.
Additional collaborations with the private sector include the
formation of a research partnership between Abtran, Ireland’s
largest provider of business process services and UCC’s Cork
Constraint Computation Centre. This engagement seeks to
develop next-generation systems for use in business process
outsourcing and will help position Ireland as a centre of excellence
in the €300 billion global business processes industry. In June
2010, UCC announced academic/industrial collaboration with
Almac, a contract research and manufacturing organisation
based in Northern Ireland. This partnership will focus on
exploiting opportunities in the field of solid state chemistry. In
September, TNI and Intel Corporation, the world leader in silicon
innovation, signed a $1.5m agreement that will lead to a joint
programme of advanced research over the next three years.
In September 2010, UCC was recognised for its efforts in the area
of public-private sector collaboration with the announcement
that the institution was the top ‘Knowledge Provider’ university
in Enterprise Ireland’s €11million Innovation Voucher initiative.
Earlier in the year, the Irish approach to promoting interaction
between universities and industry in the field of microchip
design was recognised as the best in the world. The Irish team,
led by Professor Peter Kennedy, TNI and Vice-President for
Research, received the Outstanding Chapter of the Year Award
from the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society, the world’s largest
professional association.
Food and health is a central theme of UCC’s research and
teaching programmes. The university has made considerable
investment in this sector over several decades, including the
development of a long-term partnership with Teagasc that has
resulted in closer integration of research personnel and facilities.
In May 2010, a major step towards establishing a single food
research programme in Ireland, to support innovation and
development in the food industry, was taken with the launch of
the UCC-Teagasc Strategic Alliance in Food Research. This new
alliance moves collaboration between the two organisations to
a new level, through the sharing of resources, working to a joint
research programme and the establishment of a single portal
for food companies to access international quality research and
innovation.
Other notable research achievements in 2009/2010 included
the award of funding by the European Research Council (ERC)
to Dr Ron Pinhasi (Archaeology). Dr Pinhasi is the first UCC
researcher to be awarded funding by the ERC, a body set
up by the European Commission to support the very best of
research across all fields of scholarship. Indeed, because of
the focus on excellence and the highly competitive nature of
their programmes, success in the ERC is now widely identified
throughout Europe as being the newest and most significant
barometer of a country’s achievement and ranking in research.