Awards and Prizes in 2018/2019
Irish Research Council Early Career Researcher of the Year Award
Maths Week Ireland Award Professor Anthony O'Farrell and Dr Fiacre Ó Cairbre
Dr Karen English
Dr Karen English, Department of Biology
Dr Karen English won the Early-Career Researcher of the Year Award of the Irish Research Council (IRC). Dr English was presented with the IRC Award in recognition of her research on developing ‘calming’ cells in therapies for inflammatory conditions such as asthma, and for immune system disorders, such as organ transplant rejection. Dr Karen English is an alumna of Maynooth having graduated three times from this university with BSc, MSc and then PhD in 2008. She subsequently was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to carry out her postdoctoral training at the University of Oxford (20092011) before returning to Maynooth University, first as a Health Research Board Translational Medicine Research Fellow and later as a Science Foundation Ireland Starting Investigator. She was appointed as a Lecturer in the Biology Department in 2015, and in 2018 is one of just 36 academics in Ireland, across all fields of research, to be awarded an Irish Research Council Laureate Award to progress her work. Dr English is a Principal Investigator at Maynooth University’s Department of Biology and head of the Cellular Immunology Lab.
Dr Fiacre Ó Cairbre, Department of Mathematics, and Professor Anthony O’Farrell, Professor Emeritus Professor Anthony O’Farrell and Dr Fiacre Ó Cairbre, were honoured with the Maths Week Ireland Award for their contribution to raising public awareness of maths. The annual award is presented during Maths Week Ireland, the world’s largest festival of maths and numeracy. Professor O'Farrell founded the annual Hamilton walk in 1990 and Dr Ó Cairbre has now run it for many years. The walk celebrates the day, October 16, and the route taken by William Rowan Hamilton one of the world’s most outstanding mathematicians, who discovered quaternions in a stroke of inspiration while walking along the banks of the Royal Canal in Dublin. His discovery changed the future of mathematics. Hamilton scratched his formulas for the quaternions into the wall at Broome Bridge, Cabra. Maths Week Ireland is funded through the Science Foundation Ireland Discover Programme, the Department of Education and Skills, Matrix (the Northern Ireland Science Industry Panel), ESB and Xilinx, and co-ordinated by Calmast, Waterford Institute of Technology’s Stem Outreach Centre.
Maynooth University Research and Innovation Report 2020
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