Stefano Sanvito MRIA, School of Physics and Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices, Trinity College Dublin

Our ability to manufacture, control and use materials has always been key for the well-being of humanity. The steam engines that powered the first industrial revolution in the eighteenth century were possible because we knew how to make steel; information and communication technologies, the core of the most recent industrial revolution, are intimately related to our understanding of silicon. The complexity of many modern technologies now calls for the development, at a formidable speed, of innovative materials solutions. These solutions should be tightly tailored to the given application but, at the same time, they need to be considerate of the environment and aware of their possible socio-economic impact; for instance, they must be cheap. Finding the best material for a given application is by no means an easy task, and the ‘conventional’ trial-and-error experimental approach is no longer an option.

My research uses computer simulations to speed up the development of materials and devices. More specifically, my group focuses both on developing new numerical strategies for predicting the properties of materials and devices, in advance of conducting experiments, and on using such strategies for large-scale screening. The fundamental theory underpinning the work is quantum mechanics, whose equations I am trying to solve. This is the realm of first-principles methods: the simulations do not require any information from previously conducted experiments.

One of my flagship projects is the development of the Smeagol code, which is the world-leading software for simulating devices at the atomic scale. Smeagol, distributed worldwide to more than 200 groups, has impacted on a multitude of technologies, ranging from data storage to DNA sequencing, from solar-energy harvesting to sensing. More recently, my research group has started to combine such first-principles techniques with numerical methods within data science, namely machine learning and artificial intelligence. This allows us to create and explore enormous datasets, to rationalise our understanding, and ultimately to speed up the materials-discovery process.

My research uses computer simulations to speed up the development of materials and devices. More specifically, my group focuses both on developing new numerical strategies for predicting the properties of materials and devices, in advance of conducting experiments, and on using such strategies for large-scale screening. The fundamental theory underpinning the work is quantum mechanics, whose equations I am trying to solve… One of my flagship projects is the development of the Smeagol code, which is the world-leading software for simulating devices at the atomic scale.

Having studied physics in Milan, Italy, I took my Ph.D. in Lancaster, UK, and after two years at the University of California Santa Barbara, I joined the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin in 2002. I became associate professor there in 2006, and in 2012, professor of Condensed Matter Theory. Since 2013 I have been the director of the Center for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), Ireland’s premier nanoscience institute; for the period 2013–15 I was the director of the SFI-funded AMBER Center, also at Trinity. I have been successful in securing funding for the internationally recognised Computational Spintronics Group, and over my career I have attracted funding in excess of €70,000,000. I have authored more than 300 papers, three books and numerous book chapters.

In 2007 I received the Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), and in 2012 the prestigious European Research Council Award. As well as being a member of the Royal Irish Academy, I am a fellow of the Institute of Physics and a fellow of Trinity College Dublin. In 2017 I was conferred the title of Cavaliere della Stella d’Italia ( ‘Knight of the star of Italy’), an Italian knighthood given to Italians abroad who have contributed to enhancing the prestige of Italy and to establishing relations with foreign countries. In 2020 I was included in the ClarivateTM list of highly cited researchers.

A man with short brown hair and a beard, wearing a suit and tie, stands in front of a wall of glass blocks
Richard Reilly MRIA

Richard Reilly MRIA, Professor of Neural Engineering, Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin

My career has been driven by my fascination with neurology. I have coupled my original background in electronic engineering to the emerging field of neuroscience to explore issues of clinical importance.

As Professor of Neural Engineering, a discipline within biomedical engineering that draws on the fields of electrophysiology, clinical neurology, experimental neuroscience and electronic engineering, my research focus is on how sensory and movement impairments may affect cognitive and physical function. The aim is to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms of and potential interventions for optimising cognitive health and physical function. My research therefore spans disciplinary areas from biomedical engineering to neurology, neurophysiology, audiology and gerontology. My lab is a constituent laboratory of the Trinity Centre of Biomedical Engineering and the Trinity Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.

My research team develops signal-processing methods to extract information from electro-physiological data, and we use quantitative methods to understand neurological function. This approach allows my lab to aid clinical diagnosis and also to create neural prosthetics and neuromodulation devices. We also develop analytical and neuroimaging methods to assess the outcomes of clinical interventions. In the lab we are particularly interested in understanding how the brain processes sensory information in specific movement disorders: Dystonia and Parkinson’s disease. We have been generating experimental evidence that adult-onset Dystonia is associated with structural and neurophysiological changes considered to reflect defective inhibitory processing within a network that includes the superior colliculus, a brain circuit for the transformation of sensory input into movement output, along with the basal ganglia, and the primary somatosensory cortex.

We also work with active implantable devices, such as cochlear implants. We have developed signal-processing methods to quantify objectively how cochlear implant users process temporal and spectral acoustic information. This is essential clinical information to ensure the devices are perfectly tuned to the individual. Given the importance of translating ideas out of the lab, we have patented some of these research methods and licensed them to the medical-device industry.

We have also contributed to advanced quantitative methods for clinical decision-making concerning respiratory medicine. Our work in this area has focused on objective methods for measuring patient adherence to medication and the effect of pharmaceutical interventions. We have developed new acoustics methods to monitor longitudinally patient adherence and drug deposition, and to estimate respiratory function. We have patented some research outputs in this area too, and licensed the methods to the medical-device industry.

We typically have multidisciplinary teams of neurologists, neurophysiologists, neuroscientists and neural engineers working together on our research projects… An example of the practical aspect of the work in our lab is the development of technologies for objectively managing chronic disease and disease processes associated with ageing. Identifying early markers of cognitive impairment is paramount in order to implement potential prevention strategies and to inform patient management. Gait is a complex process known to involve several key brain regions involved in decision-making, processing speed, and cognitive flexibility.

Another example of the practical aspect of the work in our lab is the development of technologies for objectively managing chronic disease and disease processes associated with ageing. Identifying early markers of cognitive impairment is paramount in order to implement potential prevention strategies and to inform patient management. Gait is a complex process known to involve several key brain regions involved in decision-making, processing speed, and cognitive flexibility. A simple gait assessment has the potential to screen quickly for cognitive decline. Developments in gait-assessment sensor technology have enabled convenient, brief, and objective measurements of many aspects of gait performance. We are developing analytical methods based on gait, acquired from sensor data, to detect subtle changes in cognitive function in a range of clinical cohorts.

As mentioned, we typically have multidisciplinary teams of neurologists, neurophysiologists, neuroscientists and neural engineers working together on our research projects. My research has only been possible because of very productive working relationships with excellent clinical colleagues at St Vincent’s University Hospital, the Mater Hospital, Beaumont Hospital, St James’s Hospital and Tallaght University Hospital. The willingness of volunteers to carry out our experiments is also fundamental, and we are always grateful to them for giving of their time so generously. We have a network of active clinical and neural engineering collaborations with colleagues in Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the US.

The European Scientific Advice Mechanism (SAM), working with a European Commission group of chief scientific advisors and the European Academies (SAPEA), provides independent and transparent scientific advice to the European Commission. In 2019, I co-edited, along with my colleague Rose Anne Kenny MRIA and two other colleagues in Europe, a report written for the SAM, titled Transforming the future of ageing. This evidence-review report examines how public health programmes aimed at protecting and improving the health of people and their communities can improve the prospects of current and future ageing EU citizens. In 2016 there were 98 million people in the EU aged 65 years or older, compared with 80 million children aged under 16 years. Taking into consideration that the life expectancy of the next generation of older adults is likely to surpass that of their parents, it becomes necessary to foresee and plan for the challenges that they will face. Technology will play an increasing role in promoting healthy lifestyles and will also revolutionise care-delivery systems.

I am also involved in many additional science-related activities. I am a member of the board of the Health Products Regulatory Authority and chair of the HPRA’s Medical Devices Advisory Committee. I am a member of the board of the National Rehabilitation Hospital and a director of the Irish Institute of Clinical Neuroscience. I am also a member of the editorial boards of several scientific journals, and am associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, which has the same ethos as my lab and publishes work in the intersection of engineering and clinical translation.

A woman with short blonde hair wearing a cream blazer
Jennifer Todd MRIA

Jennifer Todd MRIA, Research Director, Institute for British–Irish Studies, University College Dublin. Fellow at Geary Institute, UCD, and emeritus professor, School of Politics and International Relations, UCD

To those who grow up in conflict-riven and changing societies, as I did in 1960s, rural, mixed-religion Northern Ireland, it is evident that the conflicting ideals and contradictory social processes of the wider society are condensed as much in personal experience and everyday intuition as in political organisation and institutions. That insight, which goes back to Hegel, has informed a whole tradition of critical theory and sociology. My initial work in philosophy of perception and aesthetics quickly drew me to this perspective. Much later, as I began to work empirically on conflict processes, it was with the conviction that study of particular social situations and meaning-making within them reveals more about how general processes and logics function, and about what drives and hinders change, than does a distant generalising perspective. My first book with Joseph Ruane, Dynamics of conflict in Northern Ireland (Cambridge UP, 1996), showed how an early historical conjuncture locked in tendencies to inequality, groupness and conflict. It traced how this allowed ordinary citizens with ordinary economic and political motives, as well as political actors, to reproduce these tendencies through geo-political change, institutional reform, modernisation and political reconfigurations, so that conflict persisted—in different forms and intensities—up to the 1990s.

Change became more rapid in both parts of Ireland in the 2000s. At the same time, my own research was moving towards the micro-empirical—the experiences, reflections and intuitions of everyday, non-activist citizens—and I faced the challenge of developing comparatively valid explanations and general insights from this most particular of topics. [1] My book Identity change after conflict (Springer, 2018) develops this research, comparing modes of change in ethno-religious boundaries and national-communal identities in the two Irish jurisdictions. I analyse types of change, the logic and values guiding it, and traps of change, the obstacles met by respondents, which vary with type and with resources. I use a multiplicity of comparisons and a range of replicable qualitative methods: from counting ‘we’s to comparing the narratives of change and of obstacles to change experienced by very similar mixed couples in very different social contexts. By using micro-experiential narratives as key evidence in explaining macro-level outcomes, the book makes an original social scientific contribution to understanding the role of everyday meaning-making in social change. It raises the question how to make sense more generally of the role of identity change and reflexivity in social transformation.

My research on macro-level institutional processes led to a new book, co-authored with John Coakley, Negotiating a settlement in Northern Ireland 1969–2019 (Oxford UP, 2020), which traces how states change direction and provides very extensive primary evidence for each stage of the process. We reproduce segments of witness seminars and interviews organised by the Institute for British–Irish Studies (IBIS), UCD, and a multiplicity of drafts of intergovernmental agreements. We use these, and other data, to analyse the changing understandings of the elites involved in steering the ships of state in the UK and the Republic of Ireland towards a settlement in Northern Ireland. Our analysis reveals a process of layering of policy-concepts, as different elements are built one on another in a slowly converging understanding of what is necessary to end conflict. Only some of these policy-layers were legally and institutionally entrenched; others have recently been reversed. Our research also generated a much wider archive of elite interviews, which is a treasure trove that we hope will allow for future comparative analysis of the discourse, aims and understanding of state elites, and the policy paradigms that guide their action. [2] We are now involved with colleagues across these islands in a new study of the negotiation of Northern Ireland protocols and backstops in the Brexit talks.

My recent and ongoing research … analyses micro-level identity and discursive changes, explores their interrelations with meso- andmacro-level identity change, teases out these conflicting logics in the particular case of unionism, and maps the diversity of voices and issues that need to be brought into constitutional debates.

On this island, and much more widely, we are entering an intellectually exciting and politically dangerous period of constitutional rethinking. Within IBIS, UCD, and in the ARINS research programme (Analysing and researching Ireland north and south) led by the Royal Irish Academy and the University of Notre Dame, my present research centres on the conditions of political, social and constitutional transformation and the role of reflexivity in social change, with particular reference to the ongoing constitutional debates and policy dilemmas on the island of Ireland, in its British and European context. My recent and ongoing research (with Bahar Rumelili, of Koc University, Istanbul; Stephanie Dornschneider and Dawn Walsh of UCD; and Joanne McEvoy of the University of Aberdeen) analyses micro-level identity and discursive changes, explores their interrelations with meso- and macro-level identity change, teases out these conflicting logics in the particular case of unionism, and maps the diversity of voices and issues that need to be brought into constitutional debates.

Joseph Ruane and I are working on a sequel to Dynamics of conflict in Northern Ireland, taking account of the intersection of macro-, meso- and micro-level processes; the prospects and the difficulties of overcoming tendencies to conflict; and the (in)capacity of the politically dominant logics to identify the real prospects of transforming conflict on this island. This research is relevant to public debate and policy. I also see it as the start of a theoretical engagement with reflexivity, power and social transformation in the twenty-first century.

A woman (Kathleen James-Chakraborty) poses for a photo with her RIA Gold Medal. She is smiling and wears glasses and she has dark short hair.
Kathleen James-Chakraborty MRIA, 2018 RIA Gold Medallist in the Humanities.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty MRIA, Architectural Historian, University College Dublin

Buildings matter. We all inhabit them. At their best they have the power to transform our lives through the artistry that informs their design and their construction. At their worst they heighten anxiety and the marginalisation of those who are already disempowered by poverty, racism and sexism. My scholarship addresses the connections between buildings and the societies that erect them.

As a discipline, architectural history has focused disproportionately on a small corpus of buildings of outstanding artistic merit, attributed almost exclusively to the men credited with designing them, with the credit shared in some cases with the client who commissioned them. My interest is in analysing the political, cultural and economic contexts in which the architect and the client make decisions, such as the choice of forms—including styles—that are intended to communicate particular meanings. I am also interested in identifying who the audience for those meanings may be.

Technological innovations, such as the development of reinforced concrete, can provide opportunities to create new kinds of spaces. Paying close attention to the specific needs associated with particular building types as diverse in their requirements as department stores and churches, has enabled me to reconstruct the ways in which German commercial and religious architecture was, during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), relentlessly modern, without closely resembling the Bauhaus or the housing estates that have dominated most accounts of this transformative chapter in the history of architecture.

The original focus of my scholarship was on twentieth-century German architecture. Over time, however, it has expanded to encompass architecture around the world since 1400, with a particular focus on the contributions of women. I am also strongly committed to telling more inclusive histories. This can manifest itself in quite different ways. In German Architecture for a Mass Audience, I explored the degree to which stylistic changes adopted by actors across the political spectrum in twentieth-century Germany all shared the intent of creating communities across class lines. In Architecture since 1400, I demonstrated that modernity and modernism were never the exclusive property of people of European descent, and that slave cabins and shanty towns belong beside palaces and parliaments in a global approach to this history of architecture.

I am also strongly committed to telling more inclusive histories. This can manifest itself in quite different ways. In German Architecture for a Mass Audience, I explored the degree to which stylistic changes adopted by actors across the political spectrum in twentieth-century Germany all shared the intent of creating communities across class lines. In Architecture since 1400, I demonstrated that modernity and modernism were never the exclusive property of people of European descent, and that slave cabins and shanty towns belong beside palaces and parliaments in a global approach to this history of architecture.

Gender also matters. In recent work on Denise Scott Brown and Zaha Hadid, two of the most celebrated women architects of the last half century, I seek to uncover the circumstances, including growing up in privileged households on the fringes of the British empire, that help account for their success. I am equally committed to expanding our understanding of who has had agency over the appearance of the built environment by documenting the contributions of women who have shaped taste through their careers as journalists and real-estate developers, or by running influential design businesses. I am also collaborating with conservation architect Bryan Clark Green in drawing attention to the Robert Vann Memorial Tower on the campus of Virginia Union University in Richmond. Named for an influential Black journalist, it provides an important counterweight to the Confederate memorials that long dominated nearby Monument Avenue.

An additional concern of my work is the creation of an active, engaged public that contributes to the shaping of the environment in which we live. As a scholar, I have demonstrated the way in which Germans learned to be democratic in part through public debates over the shape their cities should take. Architecture is central to the creation of equitable and sustainable societies, and it remains at the core of human experience, including of our greatest collective challenges.

A man stands at a desk with laptops and a microphone
Rob Kitchin MRIA

Rob Kitchin MRIA, Professor and ERC Advanced Investigator in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, Maynooth University

I am a geographer and I research how digital technologies are reshaping urban life and how cities are managed and governed.

Since the 1950s and the birth of digital computing, cities and the activities that take place within them have become ever more entwined with the digital. Vast amounts of real-time data are now routinely produced and acted on by a plethora of networked devices to mediate and augment everyday life—work, consumption, travel, communication, play and domestic tasks. The widespread embedding of computation into the infrastructure and management of cities, and how we undertake all kinds of tasks, has unfolded relatively quickly—ushering in the age of so-called smart cities.

Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, I lived in a fairly analogue world. All of our household appliances and our car were electro-mechanical, with no digital components. My schoolwork was paper-based. If I wanted to discover information, I went to the library and searched through hardcopy books. I listened to music via the radio or by playing vinyl records or tape cassettes, and television consisted of three, then four, channels. Communication was by written letter and a landline phone. My friends all lived locally.

In the 1990s everything seemed to change. In 1991 my parents bought me my first personal computer. My university lecturers communicated with the class using email, and I could chat to my friends and transfer files online. I first accessed the worldwide web in 1993 and a year later invested in a modem to connect to it from home. I made my first online purchase in 1995. By 2000 the internet was having significant effects on business, governance and entertainment, and mobile phones were just starting to establish themselves.

I was fascinated by the changes taking place. My first published article, in 1995, was about the internet as a resource for geographical scholarship. My first book, Cyberspace, published in 1998, discussed the ways in which culture, politics, administration and the economy were rapidly changing with the roll-out of internet technologies. Two following books—Mapping cyberspace (2000) and the Atlas of cyberspace (2001)—written with long-term collaborator Martin Dodge, examined the geographic distribution and impact of the internet and the spaces created and encountered online.

In the early 2000s our attention turned to role of software and algorithms and how they worked to shape the production of space—how airports, supermarkets, offices, homes, and other locales functioned and were experienced. This research culminated in the book Code/Space: software and everyday life (2011). While software is one key element to digital technologies, data is the other, and in 2014 I published The data revolution, which examined how our interactions with computation was generating vast amounts of data that were being used to profile us and make decisions that affected our everyday lives.

This interest in software and data from a social sciences perspective became the focus of a European Research Council Advanced Investigator project, ‘The Programmable City’, which ran from 2013 to 2018. The research conducted sought to examine the recursive processes through which the city and its people and activities are encoded in software and captured as data, and how these software and data are then used to reshape urban life and how it is managed. Using two case-study sites, Dublin and Boston, and examining a number of different technologies and activities—traffic control rooms, smart bikes, smart lighting, emergency management, city dashboards, urban testbeds, civic hacking—we documented how smart urbanism was unfolding in practice.

This interest in software and data from a social sciences perspective became the focus of a European Research Council Advanced Investigator project, ‘The Programmable City’, which ran from 2013 to 2018. The research conducted sought to examine the recursive processes through which the city and its people and activities are encoded in software and captured as data, and how these software and data are then used to reshape urban life and how it is managed. Using two case-study sites, Dublin and Boston, and examining a number of different technologies and activities—traffic control rooms, smart bikes, smart lighting, emergency management, city dashboards, urban testbeds, civic hacking—we documented how smart urbanism was unfolding in practice.

What the project highlighted was the diverse praxes and politics underpinning the development, testing and roll-out of smart-city technologies, and the contingent and relational ways in which their effects are realised. In particular, it shed light on two related issues. First, it exposed the ethical, civil liberties, citizenship and governmentality concerns raised by using such technologies, and highlighted how they infringe on privacy, how they sort people socially and spatially, and how they seek to reshape and control people’s actions in specific ways. Second, it detailed the ways in which advocacy coalitions work to promote visions of the city that serve particular interests—by marketising city services and enacting a regime of technocratic governance—and how this is resisted by citizens and other stakeholders, creating an adoption gap. To date the project has produced a large number of publications, including thirteen books and dozens of papers and book chapters.

In addition, the research led to a related project, ‘Building City Dashboards’ (BCD), funded by Science Foundation Ireland from 2016 to 2020. In 2014, we launched the Dublin Dashboard, which displayed interactive visualisations of time-series data, including real-time data, and maps about the performance of the city across a number of themes (for instance, population, economy, transport, health, and environment). The aim of the BCD project was to conduct systematic and rigorous research on how best to create city dashboards. We paid particular attention to three core issues. First, data problems concerning processing, quality and archiving. Second, visualisation and interaction problems, and how to produce effective visual analytics; how to optimise them for different devices and platforms; how to create multi-modal displays, including 3D environments (virtual reality, augmented reality, and map projecting onto a 3D printed model); and how to improve user experience. Third, analytics/modelling problems, moving beyond visual analytics to perform data analytics, statistical modelling, predictions and simulations. In addition to reworking the Dublin Dashboard, we also developed one for Cork. We also made a commitment to use an open science approach, so that the data used and code produced would be openly accessible.

What both projects have made clear is that smart-city technologies are complex socio-technical assemblages composed of hardware, infrastructure, software and data, and whose development and operation is framed by a range of social, political, economic, governance, policy and legal factors. They work in contingent and relational ways, grounded in local contexts. They are full of politics with respect to their production, roll-out and use, and they raise a number of ethical questions. We are still trying to make sense of smart urbanism; the rapid roll-out of new technologies means the landscape is constantly shifting and new questions and concerns are arising. For example, my recent work involved considering the repurposing of locative media for tackling the Covid-19 pandemic and the civil liberties issues this raises (‘Civil liberties or public health, or civil liberties and public health? Using surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of Covid-19’, Space and Polity 2020). My latest book, Slow computing, considers how we might lead more balanced digital lives.

Diane Negra MRIA, Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture, University College Dublin

At the heart of my work is a desire to understand how we articulate and challenge collective beliefs, ideals and values through media fictions. My research in media studies, cultural studies and gender studies encompasses a wide variety of media forms, often analysing the interrelations between film, television and digital media.

I have long been fascinated by the fantasies of Europe that proliferate in American culture and by the functions that European nationalities and ethnicities have been made to serve in the US imaginary. My first two books, Off-white Hollywood: American culture and ethnic female stardom and A feminist reader in early cinema, reflect efforts to understand this relationship and particularly Hollywood’s history of constructing and selling ethnic-tinged female stars to a global public.

As a pre-eminent form of ‘off-whiteness’, Irishness has long occupied a particular place in the American imaginary. In The Irish in us: Irishness, performativity and popular culture I analyse how this dynamic functioned during the Celtic Tiger years. In a new project, Modalities of Irishness, I revisit and update some of this work to consider who models and claims Irishness now, and for what ends, in an era marked by conspicuous and pervasive inequality alongside the ‘platforming’ of selfhood on social media.

Another strand of my work deals with gender and representation in terms both of the history of female representation by the culture industries and of up-to-the-minute questions about how ‘postfeminism’ operates to negotiate a cultural scene in which claims of feminist victories are squared with abundant evidence of gender recidivism. I took up these questions in What a girl wants? Fantasizing the reclamation of self in postfeminism, in Interrogating postfeminism: gender and the politics of popular culture and in Gendering the recession: media and culture in an age of austerity. Amidst sweeping changes in gender norms and the public status of feminism, I am currently completing two further volumes, which will be published in 2021: Imagining ‘We’ in the age of ‘I’: romance and social bonding in contemporary culture and Anti-feminisms in media culture.

Although most of my work focuses on contemporary media culture, I continue to engage with the silent and classical Hollywood eras and have just completed a monograph on the film that Alfred Hitchcock considered his best, the overlooked and brilliant Shadow of a doubt.

While my work has long been guided by a strong sense of the links between media history and theory and the importance of the study of representation within cultural, social and ideological contexts, an increasing concern for me in recent years has been with the way in which film, television and new media forms mediate tensions between democratic rhetorics of equality and the lived experience of the majority of citizens.

While my work has long been guided by a strong sense of the links between media history and theory and the importance of the study of representation within cultural, social and ideological contexts, an increasing concern for me in recent years has been with the way in which film, television and new media forms mediate tensions between democratic rhetorics of equality and the lived experience of the majority of citizens. In this vein, in books such as Old and new media after Katrina and Extreme weather and global media, I have turned toward the representation of climate change and disaster.

Much of my recent and upcoming research addresses public affective cultures in various ways. The aesthetics and affects of cuteness analysed the rise of cuteness as a major mode of cultural pleasure and consolation. In a less sanguine register, my work is increasingly animated by a sense of concern about the ways that neoliberal technologisation is diminishing our common humanity. I have just started to explore this in research focusing on what it means to be a customer in an era of deregulation and the elimination of antitrust enforcement and broadly declining norms/expectations of accountability, and I expect to continue this work in the next few years.

A woman wearing a hat, sits in a grassy field making notes in a notebook
Yvonne Buckley MRIA

Yvonne Buckley MRIA, Professor of Zoology, Trinity College Dublin and Honorary Professor, University of Queensland

My research deals with the ups and downs of populations. I am a population ecologist, which means I look at the natural world through a lens of numbers.

We are surrounded by millions of populations: of animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms, all growing, reproducing and dying at different rates. It is relatively easy to monitor the ups and downs of human populations through censuses—literally counting all individuals and characterising them in different ways. It is also straightforward to run demographic models to determine, for example, how many people of pensionable age our society will need to support in 10 or 20 years’ time. What can be very challenging, however, is monitoring the ups and downs of tiny insect populations, or clonal plants, when it is difficult to tell even what an individual countable unit is. But, it is the growth or decline of the many lives that surround us humans that determines the ability of us all to live on our planet.

The earliest piece of independent research I attempted was to put some flies in a jar to see how long they would live. My mother quickly put a stop to this barbaric proto-ecology and diverted my attentions to something more suitable for an 8- or 9-year-old to be up to. Since then I have personally counted white-headed ducks in Anatolia, ribwort plantain in Ireland, St John’s wort in Australia, pines in New Zealand and jatropha trees in Mexico. Counting is useful and necessary, but it can be surprisingly difficult and arduous. It turns out that ducks are hard to count when you have to count up as well as down due to hunters picking them off from the other side of the lake. A commitment to duck counting is also difficult to maintain when the rifle is pointed at you rather than the ducks.

What really excites me, however, is using the hard-won data to determine what happens to populations under different scenarios or conditions. Most of my work is spent in front of a computer, making sense of the thousands of data points of demographic transitions that populations go through in order to persist through multiple generations.

These days we are increasingly familiar with the R0 (R nought) of epidemiology: it is a number that has determined how far we can venture outside our houses; whether and where we can shop; and how crowded our hospitals are likely to be. In epidemiology, R0 is the number of new cases of a disease likely to result from one infection. In population biology it is the number that tells you whether you have an increasing population (R0 > 1) or a decreasing population (R0 < 1). When you work on problematic pest species or species that are in danger of extinction, R0 is a critical piece of information that can tell you whether your pest control or conservation actions are working or not.

We are surrounded by millions of populations: of animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms, all growing, reproducing and dying at different rates. It is relatively easy to monitor the ups and downs of human populations through censuses—literally counting all individuals and characterising them in different ways. It is also straightforward to run demographic models to determine, for example, how many people of pensionable age our society will need to support in 10 or 20 years’ time. What can be very challenging, however, is monitoring the ups and downs of tiny insect populations, or clonal plants, when it is difficult to tell even what an individual countable unit is. But, it is the growth or decline of the many lives that surround us humans that determines the ability of us all to live on our planet.

My research group uses models to discover how population growth or decline is affected by the underlying individual growth rates, reproduction rates and mortality rates of populations. We use this information to determine which members of the population to target for management actions to raise or lower R0 to a desirable level, or to determine which kinds of populations and species might be most vulnerable to pressures such as climate change. Right now we are working on a global population model of how a common grassland species, ribwort plantain, responds to different environmental conditions from the subtropics to the subarctic. We are also working on what conditions enable flamingo populations in captivity to breed, and how characteristics of different species of plants determine their life history.

There’s no doubt that biodiversity right across the planet is under threat from multiple pressures, and my research is highly motivated by how we can improve the state of biodiversity so that it can continue to support human survival and wellbeing.

A man with short brown hair, wearing a burgundy jumper smiles in front of a bush of flowers
Paul J. Devereux MRIA

Paul J. Devereux MRIA, School of Economics, University College Dublin

I am a professor of economics at University College Dublin. I received my PhD from Northwestern University and then worked at UCLA before coming to UCD in 2005. My research mainly studies intergenerational transmission and the effects of family background and environmental influences on child outcomes such as education, earnings and wealth. Here, I describe some recent work (undertaken jointly with Judith Delaney) that has focused on third level education in Ireland.

Gender gap in STEM

In this study (Delaney and Devereux, 2019), we examine the gender gap in the study of STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) at third level in Ireland, using data on student choices provided by the Central Applications Office (CAO). We find a large gender gap in the percentage of applicants opting for a STEM course as their first preference, with just over 40% of males listing a preference for a STEM course compared with roughly 19% of females. As Fig. 1 shows, the gender gaps are small for sciences and mathematics but very large in technology and engineering. Gender differences in enrolment into STEM courses are similar to gender differences in first preferences for course selection.

Fig. 1: The proportion of applicants ranking a STEM college course as first preference

When we look for reasons for the gender gap in STEM, we find some role for comparative advantage (compared to males, females score relatively better in English than in mathematics, and higher grades in mathematics relative to English strongly predicts STEM choice). We find that subject choices in post-primary school are, however, the most important predictor of the gender gap. While this may partly reflect the differing subjects that are available in girls’ versus boys’ schools, our finding of similar subject-choice differences in mixed-gender schools suggests that availability of subjects is not an important consideration. Boys are much more likely to do physics, design graphics, engineering, building construction, and applied mathematics in school; subjects that are strongly predictive of later doing STEM courses in college. So, even two years before college entry, there are systematic gender differences in decision-making that lead to boys being more likely to choose STEM subjects.

Strikingly, we find that there remains a STEM gender gap of 9 percentage points even for persons who have identical preparation at the end of post-primary schooling (in terms of both subjects studied and grades achieved). Clearly, there are systematic gender differences in the tendency to list STEM courses even amongst academically observationally equivalent boys and girls. These differences could be influenced by biological or cultural factors, socialisation, role-model effects, peer effects, expectations of future discrimination, job preferences and many other factors; understanding these better will be an important objective of future research.

College application behaviour and the persistence of educational advantage

In another study (Delaney and Devereux, 2020), we use CAO data to study differences in college application behaviour between students from disadvantaged versus advantaged post-primary schools. Ireland provides an interesting laboratory for this analysis as applicants use a single centralised application process to provide a preference-ordering of college programmes. College admission depends almost completely on grades in the Leaving Certificate examinations. Thus, we can compare the applications of students who have equal chances of admission to college programmes. We study differences in application behaviour between students from disadvantaged schools (called DEIS schools) and students from fee-paying schools, which largely educate students from high-income families.

We find that there are systematic differences in application behaviour among students with the same college opportunities. Students from more advantaged schools are more likely to list a university programme as first preference and more likely to list programmes in which entrants have high median points. These differences are present throughout the achievement distribution (as measured by Leaving Certificate points), not just for high achievers (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Characteristics of first choice programme by deciles of achievement distribution

Note: Disadvantaged schools represent the reference category. Figures conditional on age, year, gender, Leaving Certificate points and programme requirements. Separate regressions are run for each decile.

These findings are largely unrelated to differences in field of study preferences. One partial explanation, however, is geographic location: advantaged schools are more likely to be located close to universities. Taking account of this factor reduces the size of the effects of school advantage on college choice rankings, but they remain large. We conclude that, while geography matters, it is not just geography that determines gaps in college choice behaviour between students in advantaged and disadvantaged schools.

Importantly, we find that enrolment gaps are smaller than differences in application behaviour; the relatively meritocratic admissions system based on Leaving Certificate achievement undoes much of the difference in application behaviour between students from advantaged and disadvantaged schools. A large gap in programme selectivity remains, however, for the highest achievers (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Application and enrolment by quartile of achievement

Note: Disadvantaged schools represent the reference category. Figures conditional on age, year, gender, Leaving Certificate points and programme requirements. Quartiles based on Leaving Certificate points of sample who enrol in college. Separate regressions run for each achievement quartile.

My recent research into college application behaviour and the persistence of educational advantage (undertaken jointly with Judith Delaney) found that there are meaningful differences in application behaviour across students who have similar college opportunities but come from schools with different levels of advantage… These enrolment differences have implications for intergenerational inequality in educational outcomes and for subsequent labour-market earnings. The findings may also suggest a potential role for information provision and application assistance to encourage students from disadvantaged schools to aim higher when applying for college.

Overall, we conclude that despite the relative simplicity and transparency of the centralised application process, there are meaningful differences in application behaviour across students who have similar college opportunities but come from schools with different levels of advantage. The centralised admissions system undoes some, but not all, of these effects, so differences in application behaviour translate into substantial differences in enrolment patterns. These enrolment differences have implications for intergenerational inequality in educational outcomes and for subsequent labour-market earnings. The findings may also suggest a potential role for information provision and application assistance to encourage students from disadvantaged schools to aim higher when applying for college.

Máirín Nic Eoin MRIA, Professor Emerita of Irish, Dublin City University

My area of research is modern and contemporary Irish-language literature. The changing social and sociolinguistic contexts of literary production in Irish have framed all my research projects and publications. My primary degree is in Modern Irish and Geography, and my first research project was a study of regional literature—in particular the forms of life writing and regional fiction to emerge in the West Kerry and Donegal Gaeltacht regions in the decades after Ireland’s independence.

Against all the odds, every generation since independence has produced writers of the highest calibre, and it is a huge privilege to be able to read the work of writers like Seosamh Mac Grianna, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Máiréad Ní Ghráda and Caitlín Maude, not to mention the truly wonderful new writing appearing each year from Irish-language publishing houses. This writing is deserving of critical appraisal, and a key responsibility of Modern Irish literary scholars is that of developing a critical language and a conceptual framework appropriate to that task.

One of the truly enriching aspects of working on modern and contemporary writing in Irish is the constantly unfolding dialogue between that writing and the rich Irish-language literary and oral tradition. Poetry and historical fiction in particular draw deeply from these wells, and my own attempts to examine ‘revisionist mythmaking’ in the work of contemporary authors have been deepened and enriched by the critical readings and insights of folklorists and scholars who are experts in the earlier literature.

Life writing and questions related to authorship and genre have been abiding interests, and the publication in 1982 of An litríocht réigiúnach has led to collaborative publication projects on emigration literature and on the experience of childhood, through the eyes of non-elite Irish-speaking communities. In Eoghan Ó Tuairisc: beatha agus saothar, published in 1988, I examined the work of a versatile bilingual writer and translator who loved Sophocles and Shakespeare as much as he did Ó Rathaille and Merriman. Research for this book brought me into the critical field of post-colonial interculturality, of which, more below.

As feminist critical perspectives came to the fore in the 1990s, gaining momentum in the wake of the publication in 1991 of the controversial first three volumes of the Field Day anthology of Irish writing, the question of female authorship in the Irish tradition could not be ignored. My doctoral thesis, a version of which was published in 1998 as B’ait leo bean: gnéithe den idé-eolaíocht inscne i dtraidisiún liteartha na Gaeilge, examined how literary genres and tropes were used over the centuries to embed a gender ideology that was profoundly disabling for women. While accounting for the dearth of named female authors, the study also acknowledged historical references to and examples of female creativity and female patronage. This dual focus was crucial, because an important motivation in undertaking that research was an understanding of the effect on contemporary women writers of the anxiety of absence associated with a male-dominated literary tradition.

In Trén bhFearann Breac: an díláithriú cultúir agus nualitríocht na Gaeilge, published in 2005, I looked at twentieth-century literature in Irish in the context of linguistic minoritisation and the accompanying processes of cultural displacement. The book critiques the Anglophone focus of much post-colonial literary criticism, both in Ireland and internationally, while also acknowledging the need for Irish-language scholars to place their own critical practice within a broader theoretical framework. Themes explored are the relationship between literary production and cultural and linguistic change, and writers’ diverse responses to questions of marginalisation, displacement, hybridity and interculturality. Since writing that book, I have been exploring further the idea of Irish-language literature as a form of minority discourse, and arguing that it is its preoccupation with issues of minority, sustainability and survival that connects literature in Irish to global ecological and humanitarian concerns.

International interest in Irish-language literature and scholarship has been increasing in recent years, and I am proud to have been involved in two landmark conferences that explored the transnational and global dimensions of Irish-language writing. One of these was co-hosted by St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra/Dublin City University and University College Dublin, and resulted in the publication in 2015 of the two-volume Litríocht na Gaeilge ar fud an domhain. The other was hosted by Charles University, Prague, with the collaboration of scholars from Dublin City University and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. It was the largest conference ever to be held through Irish outside of the island of Ireland, with contributions from speakers based in Poland, Finland, France, the United States, the UK, the Czech Republic and Ireland. A volume of selected proceedings, entitled Ar an imeall i lár an domhain: ag trasnú tairseacha staire, teanga, litríochta agus cultúir (‘On the margins in the centre of the world: crossing historical, linguistic, literary and cultural thresholds’), currently in press, reflects the diverse range of material presented at what was a truly historic gathering.

I am sometimes asked if I find working on literature in a minoritised language like Irish limiting. My answer is always an emphatic ‘No’. In fact, part of my fascination with literature in Irish is the sense of marvel at the creative output of a language that is struggling for its very existence as a community language. Writers are aware of the endangered status of their chosen medium, and yet they insist on expressing themselves in a language that will never bring them fame… I believe that, in a globalised world, literature in Irish has much to teach us about minority cultures and how they can light up paths to new forms of transnationalism.

 

I am sometimes asked if I find working on literature in a minoritised language like Irish limiting. My answer is always an emphatic ‘No’. In fact, part of my fascination with literature in Irish is the sense of marvel at the creative output of a language that is struggling for its very existence as a community language. Writers are aware of the endangered status of their chosen medium, and yet they insist on expressing themselves in a language that will never bring them fame or fortune, addressing their works to a small core readership or, in the words of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in the poem ‘Ceist na Teangan’, placing their hopes i mbáidín teanga (‘in a language boat’) in anticipation that it may take them, like Moses in his basket, into the lap of some Pharoah’s daughter.

The positive critical reception of recent translations of the works of Máirtín Ó Cadhain, and the global reputation of Ní Dhomhnaill, have helped keep literature in Irish on the world map, encouraging ongoing critical engagement. The fiftieth anniversary of Ó Cadhain’s death will be marked by a number of conferences and publications in 2020. A book currently in production is an annotated edition of three unpublished items from the Ó Cadhain papers held in Trinity College, Dublin. This is a collaboration with Helsinki-based folklorist Mícheál Briody and the items, which deal with oral and literary composition, throw fresh light on Ó Cadhain as creative writer and critic.

It is an exciting time to be working in Irish-language literary studies, with a wonderful new generation of scholars coming to the fore, and new research strands and employment opportunities opening up both in Ireland and internationally. I believe that, in a globalised world, literature in Irish has much to teach us about minority cultures and how they can light up paths to new forms of transnationalism. I hope to devote time and attention in the next phase of my work to reflecting on these issues.

A man with short hair sits in an office chair smiling
Fergal O'Brien MRIA

Fergal O’Brien MRIA, Tissue Engineering Research Group, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland

My research at the Tissue Engineering Research Group (TERG) focuses on the development and application of natural polymer, biomaterial-based therapeutics for tissue engineering. I graduated in mechanical engineering from TCD in 1997 and then completed a PhD between the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and TCD in the area of bone mechanobiology. Following time as a Fulbright Scholar in the field of biomaterials and tissue engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, I returned to RCSI in 2003, where I established the TERG after winning a Science Foundation Ireland President of Ireland Young Researcher Award.

The tissue engineering work at TERG has target applications in a number of areas, including bone, cartilage, skin, cardiovascular, respiratory, and neural tissues. A major focus of ongoing research is how to make these natural polymer and biomaterial-based scaffolds function for use as delivery systems for drugs and biomolecules such as nucleic acids (pDNA, siRNA and microRNA), in order to enhance their therapeutic potential.

I am also a principal investigator in the Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research (AMBER) Centre, which is funded by Science Foundation Ireland and by industry. AMBER research in my group includes the development of antimicrobial and electroconductive materials, and we also investigate the use of scaffolds as advanced 3D pathophysiology in vitro systems for drug development, and to further understand disease states in cancer, angiogenesis, immunology and infection. Significant research is also focused on 3D-printing and the development of novel bio-inks for tissue repair and as drug therapy delivery mechanisms. Receipt of a €3-million European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant in 2018 allows us to focus on regenerating large articular cartilage defects using a combination of next-generation gene-activated biomaterials with 3D-printing technologies. My team is also interested in the area of mechanobiology: studying the response of living cells to mechanical stimuli, and using biophysical stimuli (applied by bioreactors or controlled by modalities such as scaffold stiffness) to regulate and manipulate stem-cell differentiation. In this area of our research, we have been developing a 3D-tissue engineering-based model of craniosynostosis (the premature fusion of cranial sutures). We are undertaking this work in partnership with collaborators in Temple Street Children’s Hospital, with the aim of identifying potential therapeutic targets for premature ossification.

I have overseen the transfer of a number of regenerative technologies from the lab bench to the bedside. The first product from our group to be commercialised and implemented for clinical use—a collagen-hydroxyapatite bone graft substitute—received regulatory approval in November 2015 and has been used clinically for maxillofacial repair in many patients. Another technology developed from our research, a multi-layered scaffold for the repair of small cartilage defects, is also being assessed in a human clinical trial. An additional AMBER technology is being prepared for clinical use in partnership with Integra LifeSciences, to facilitate the repair of large nerve defect. Another exciting project involving research on the nervous system, funded by the IRFU-Charitable Trust and AMBER, is currently investigating the development of a regenerative, therapeutic-delivery platform for spinal cord repair.

AMBER research in my group includes the development of antimicrobial and electroconductive materials, and we also investigate the use of scaffolds as advanced 3D pathophysiology in vitro systems for drug development, and to further understand disease states in cancer, angiogenesis, immunology and infection.

As director of research and innovation in RCSI, I serve as a member of the RCSI senior management team with responsibility for developing, devising and implementing the strategic plan for RCSI research and innovation in Ireland and overseas. This role also involves leading the RCSI Office of Research and Innovation, which supports researchers through the planning and coordination of funding proposals, administration of grant awards, drafting and approval of research contracts, and oversight of research institute infrastructures, industry engagements, and research commercialisation. As deputy director of the AMBER Centre, I serve as co-lead on the Materials for Health platform.

I was founding co-editor of the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials; am an editorial board member for eight journals; have published over 220 journal articles; and supervised over 40 doctoral students to completion. I have served as grant panellist for many agencies, including the European Research Council, Arthritis UK and the Fulbright Programme. I have organised numerous conferences and events and served as co-chair of the World Congress of Biomechanics in 2018, which brought over 4,000 delegates to Dublin. In addition to my Fulbright Scholarship, I have been the recipient of three prestigious European Research Council Awards and of a New Investigator Recognition Award from the Orthopaedic Research Society, and I have been Engineers Ireland Chartered Engineer of the Year. I am a fellow of Engineers Ireland, the European Alliance for Medical & Biological Engineering Science, and the Anatomical Society (from which I received the New Fellow of the Year award). In 2018 I received the Silver Medal from the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland (Section of Bioengineering) and was elected to the Royal Irish Academy.