Note from the Editor

It is with great pleasure that I present to you the 2022 Maynooth University Annual Research Report which highlights the major research outputs for the academic year 2020/2021.

Over the last 5 years Maynooth has seen a large growth in research activity with significant awards from national and EU sources, the largest of which is SHAPES (Professor Mac McLachlan and Dr Michael Cooke, ALL), a Horizon 2020 4‑year programme valued at €21M as well as 4 prestigious European Research Council awards (Dr Lorna Lopez, Professor Delia Ferri, Professor Aisling McMahon and Professor Rob Kitchin).

Significant success from SFI included, 2 SFI Centres for Research Training (Professor Ken Duffy and Professor Deirdre Desmond), 2 SFI Strategic Research Partnerships, UFLYTE and Terrain AI (Dr Rowan Fealy and Professor Tim McCarthy) and a SFI spoke, Empower (Professor Markus Helfert) to name but a few.

We have seen a 39% and 36% increase in publication numbers as recorded respectively in Scopus and Web of Science and the value and number of research awards has grown by almost 50%. PhD intake over the last 5 years is up by 31% and postdoctoral numbers by 27%. These successes are supported by the tireless work carried out by my team in the Research Development Office whose efforts were rewarded as the team won the President’s award for Service Excellent in 2021. In addition, Ms Valerie Bartley from the team was awarded The President’s award for Service Excellence in 2022. The office is unique in Ireland in that we operate a ‘one stop shop’ model (integrating RDO and RDO Finance) offering services for the full end‑to‑end research project life cycle with the latest integration of the postgraduate funding team. The team gives added value to proposal development through building national and international consortia, training, writing grant proposals, budget preparation, grant negotiation, research ethics and post award supports both financial and non‑financial.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of them for their innovative thinking, commitment and continuous support to Maynooth University researchers, the VPRI and myself.

Carol Barrett Director of Research Development