PResident's RePORt 2009/2010 - University College Cork

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IRIS Appendix
49
Department of Biochemistry
Research Highlights
Professor Rosemary O’Connor
• The PhD Scholars Programme in Cancer Biology, led by Professor
O’Connor (Biochemistry), established an External Advisory
Board. Members of the Board include: Professor Gerard Evan
(University of Cambridge, UK), Dr Helke Hillebrand (European
Molecular Biology Laboratory, Germany) and Professor Donald
McDonnell (Duke University, USA). The programme currently has
10 PhD students working towards their PhD in Cancer Biology;
the Programme is accepting applications for the next cohort of
students to begin in October 2011.
Professor Dimitri Papkovsky
• Filed two patent applications: ‘Intracellular oxygen sensitive probe’
and ‘Method of toxicological assessment’. Both technologies
were subsequently licenced to Luxcel ( September 2009).
• Was awarded an FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Networks
grant to the value of €518,000 for a programme entitled
‘Chebana - Chemical Bioanalysis’.
• Was a recipient of the UCC Research Commercialisation
awards (April 2010).
Professor Tom Cotter
• Received €370,000 for leukaemia research from the Irish Cancer
Society and The Children’s Leukaemia Research Project.
Dr Karen Keeshan
• Awarded a Marie Curie EU-FP7-PEOPLE-IRG (international
reintegration grant) 2009/2013. ‘Investigating Trib2-induced
Acute Myeloid Leukaemia’ of €100,000.
Professor Mary McCaffrey
• Received SFI Principal Investigator Programme Grant Award
entitled ‘Functional analysis of the Rab11 and Rab14 GTPases
and their associated proteins in eukaryotic membrane trafficking’
of €857,618 awarded over a five-year period.
Dr Ruaidhrí Carmody
• Awarded a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant of
€100,000 for ‘Transcriptional regulation of inflammation’.
Dr Justin V. McCarthy
• Received a SFI Principal Investigator grant €702,000 for the
project, ‘Functional characterisation of presenilin-dependent
regulated intramembrane proteolysis of cytokine receptors.
Relevance to presenilin biology and immune systems’. The funding
supports the research of a team including one postdoctoral
fellow, one research assistant and two PhD students.
• Received €75,000 from IRCSET for a project entitled ‘Role of
regulated intramembrane proteolysis in cytokine signalling’. The
funding supports the research of a PhD student
• Through the College of Medicine and Health received a €1,000
grant from NAIRTL in 2009 to promote the training in research
of an undergraduate medical degree student Pranshul Chauhan
Dr Pavel Baranov (Biochemistry) and Professor Gregory
Provan (Computer Science)
• Proposed a novel hypothesis for the origin of the genetic code.
The hypothesis has been tested in silico. This finding may help
us better understand the origin of life and estimate the likelihood
of its emergence elsewhere in the universe. The genetic code
origin hypothesis was published in Baranov PV, Venin M, Provan
G. (2009) Codon Size Reduction as the Origin of the Triplet
Genetic Code. PLoS One, 4:e5708.
Dr Pavel Baranov
• A team of researchers lead by Dr Baranov (Biochemistry) have
created a centralised computational resource on human RNA
editing, DARNED database. Click here for more information. RNA
editing has been suggested as a molecular process responsible
for evolution of human intelligence, as its abundance directly
correlates with the size and complexity of the nervous system.
The two most popular Human Genome Browsers (UCSC in US
and Ensemble in EBI, UK) now feature the data from DARNED.
Awards and Honours
Dr Conor Horgan
• Biosciences ‘Researcher of the Year 2009’ was awarded to Dr
Horgan, an SFI post-doctororal researcher in the Molecular Cell
Biology laboratory.