Dr Ozgur Bayram, Department of Biology

Dr Ozgur Bayram, Department of Biology and Kathleen Lonsdale Institute for Human Health Research and Professor Philip Nolan, President of Maynooth University

Dr Ozgur Bayram, of the Department of Biology and Kathleen Lonsdale Institute for Human Health Research won the early career research achievement award in the Faculty of Science and Engineering. He received an MSc in Molecular Biology in Uludag University in Turkey and his PhD in Microbiology from the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics in Georg-August University in Germany before joining the Department of Biology in Maynooth in 2014.

His research interests are in fungal secondary metabolites including food contaminating mycotoxins. He takes an innovative approach to examine food contamination due to global warming, which combines molecular biology and quantitative proteomics, and has significant potential to combat fungal pathogenesis as a result of fungal disease, and food contamination. A key impact of his research will be on human and animal health as his discoveries are leading to new strategies to combat opportunistic human and animal fungal pathogens. Secondly, the impact of climate change on food safety and security consequent of altered patterns of mycotoxin production by fungi will be enhanced by his efforts and expertise. Since contamination of human and animal nutrients with fungal mycotoxins is a major issue for food safety and security, prevention of such contamination will allow us to feed the increased human population in a safe manner to global warming, average global temperatures will increase in the next 30-50 years, which will lead to an increase in fungal growth and therefore mycotoxin production in human and animal feed.

He holds a Career Development Award from Science Foundation Ireland and has published more than 40 peer-reviewed research papers with more than 2000 citations and an h-index of 20. He recently published in Developmental Cell, Plos Pathogens, MBIO and Genome Biology.