Research and Innovation at Maynooth University
The research addresses the right of persons with disabilities to take part in cultural life as an essential aspect of enhancing cultural diversity. In doing so, it will bridge, in a groundbreaking way, the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The project is premised on the idea that cultural exclusion of people with disabilities has not only engendered their marginalization, but it also has resulted in lost opportunities for society more broadly.
The Centre was awarded more than €13.8 million in total, rising to €18 million including industry contributions. The partnership Centre will train doctoral students to seek solutions to the technical and societal challenges of global hyper-connectivity; 24 of the centre’s 120 students will be based at Maynooth. Fourteen initial Maynooth supervisors are drawn from STEM and Social Sciences disciplines, including Psychology, Electronic Engineering, the Hamilton Institute, Law, Mathematics and Statistics, and Sociology, and many are members of the ALL Institute.
Lastly, in March 2019 Science Foundation Ireland launched a number of national Centres for Research Training in the broad area of digital and data technologies. Two of these new centres will provide training, in close collaboration with enterprise, for more than 70 doctoral students at Maynooth over the next five years in areas of identified skills need for Irish society and its economy.
Interdisciplinary initiatives of this type are extremely important, and they have significant potential for wide impact, but all such initiatives are built in the first instance on the deep disciplinary knowledge that is embodied in our 28 academic departments and schools.
The SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science is a joint initiative of Maynooth University, University College Dublin and the University of Limerick, with the support of Skillnet Ireland underpinning its industry and enterprise engagement. The Centre was awarded a total of €21 million, including industry and university contributions to train 139 PhD students towards a world-class foundational understanding of Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Machine Learning. This represents the largest ever investment in mathematical sciences research in Ireland. With Professor James Gleeson at UL and Associate Professor Claire Gormley at UCD, the Centre is co-led by Professor Ken Duffy, the director of the Maynooth University Hamilton Institute, where it will train 46 data scientists who will not only be capable of applying existing methodologies, but will be equipped with the core knowledge required to create bespoke methodological innovations for turning unforeseen data sources into knowledge. The centre commenced its intake in September 2019 and will initially have 25 research supervisors from the Hamilton Institute membership, drawn from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Department of Computer Science, the National Centre for Geocomputation, Department of Electronic Engineering and the Department of Chemistry. Dr Deirdre Desmond, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and co-director of the Assisting Living and Learning Institute (ALL) Institute, will lead Maynooth’s participation in the SFI Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies. Five Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) are collaborating in this Centre: Maynooth, CIT, UCC, TCD and TU Dublin. Local authorities, companies, NGOs, and an international network of collaborators will also take part in the initiative to meet the technical and societal challenges of global hyper-connectivity.
In 2018 Maynooth University researchers published 606 refereed journal articles, 42 books, 182 book chapters, and 36 policy reports. In addition, 21 books and collected editions were edited by Maynooth experts. Approximately two-thirds of the University’s research output is recorded in the Scopus database. That is far from the whole picture, since Scopus is relatively incomplete in its record of monographs and book chapters, and those publication forms are of particular significance in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Even though it is incomplete, the Scopus record is the one by which Universities are now most frequently benchmarked, and so we will pay attention to it here. Between 2014 and 2018 the Maynooth publication numbers recorded in Scopus were relatively constant, with between 500 and 550 publications in any year. Any one year represents only a snapshot, however, with inevitable fluctuations, and so it makes sense to look at the university’s progress over a longer timescale. In total, over the five years 2014-2018 Maynooth University researchers authored 2763 publications that were captured in the Scopus database. These publications had a field weighted citation impact1 (FWCI) of 1.70, the fourth highest of the Irish universities over that period (the highest being University College Cork at 1.85). The field weighted citation impact is a useful measure of the quality of publication output of the university as a whole. Other measures of the quality of Maynooth publications between 2014-2018 is that 13.2% were in the top 10% of cited publications worldwide, 2.2% were in the top 1% most cited, and 29% were in the top 10% of journals (citescore). In 2018, 17% of MU’s publications were in the top 10% of cited publications in their field worldwide, and 3.6% in the top 1% of cited publications (field weighted). The total value of new research grants awarded to the University in 2018/19 amounted to €21.3M which includes €19M in direct and
The FWCI is a citation index that takes account of differing citation rates between disciplines, by comparing Maynooth publications to the world output in same areas and over the same time window. www.scival.com/overview/publications/summary?uri=Institution/3190040
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Maynooth University Research and Innovation Report 2020
