2025 Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal recipients announced
The Academy is delighted to announce our 2025 Gold Medal recipients in the Humanities and Life and Medical Sciences.
Since 2005, The Royal Irish Academy (RIA) has awarded two RIA Gold Medals every year. The medals are awarded to individuals who have made a demonstrable, and internationally recognised outstanding scholarly contribution in their fields.
We are delighted to announce the recipients of the 2025 RIA Gold Medals.
Anne Fuchs MRIA
Director, Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin, has been awarded the 2025 RIA Gold Medal in Humanities.
Professor Fuch’s ground-breaking scholarship on German cultural memory, time and temporality in modernist and contemporary literature, has paved new research directions, not only in German Studies but also in interdisciplinary research areas. Major competitive grants, guest professorships, endowed research fellowships and keynotes have resulted in a dynamic network of global collaborations.
Professor Fuchs was elected to the RIA in 2009 and is a champion of the humanities and passionate supporter of early career researchers. As Chair of the Irish Humanities Alliance and a member of national and international policy committees, she has been an outspoken advocate for modern languages.
Seamus Martin MRIA
Smurfit Professor of Medical Genetics, Trinity College Dublin, has received the 2025 RIA Gold Medal in Life and Medical Sciences.
Professor Martin has made major contributions to our understanding of programmed cell death (known as apoptosis), a process that eliminates billions of cells from our tissues each day with surgical precision. Apoptosis is a highly regulated mode of cell death that helps to maintain tissue health by culling aged, injured and infected cells, as well as those cells in the early stages of cancer.
Professor Martin is internationally recognised for his contributions to our understanding of how apoptosis is regulated and for his discovery of a major marker for the identification of apoptotic cells. Understanding the genes that regulate cell death has provided new insights into how cancers arise and has contributed to the development of novel cancer therapeutics.
Professor Martin was elected to the to the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2009, and to Academia Europaea in 2023. He is an author of the acclaimed immunology textbook Essential Immunology and has served as Editor-in-Chief of The FEBS Journal (Cambridge, UK), as well as on the editorial boards of several international scientific journals. He has lectured at Trinity College Dublin for the past 25 years.
2025 Gold Medals Ceremony
The 2025 RIA Gold Medals will be presented at a ceremony held on 13 February 2025 in Academy House.
