Foundation Research Lectureships
The Foundation Research Leadership Scheme is a 3-year programme to recruit the most promising early career research stars across University of Galway's priority research areas. 15 Research Lecturer posts, funded significantly by philanthropy, will be recruited over a three-year period, across a series of targeted and open calls.
The fund of almost €7.5 million will recruit fifteen lectureships. In 2017 four Lectureships were awarded to Dr John McCrea in the area of Data Analytics, Dr Aideen Ryan in Tumour Immunology, Dr Eva Szegezdi in Cancer Biology and Dr Gordon Bromley in Climate Change Modelling.
These Lectureships reflect an innovative new approach to recruiting from a highly talented, motivated and diverse talent pool from across the globe. All of the newly recruited posts will reflect the University's strategy to develop internationally-recognised research excellence in a range of priority areas.
Dr. John McCrae has a track record in research in the area of natural language processing, in particular in the context of Data Analytics, and developed applications of this research in Biomedical Science & Engineering and Digital Humanities. John's research focuses on Big Data and Data Science; Machine translation and multilingualism; linked data and the semantic web; and digital humanities. Dr. McCrae is a highly published researcher and his research has been cited more than 800 times.
Dr. Ryan's research focuses on analysis of cancer-related tumours. She has published research on colon cancer tumorigenesis and on the role of mesenchymal stromal cells as regulators of immune responses in a variety of disease models. Her field of independent expertise is that of the tumour microenvironment, one of the most productive interfaces in current biomedical research. The excellence of her work is evident in her publications, and in her awards, most notably the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) Young Scientist of the Year Award. Dr. Ryan was awarded a Starting Investigator Research Grant (SIRG) by Science Foundation Ireland in 2016, and an Irish Cancer Society Research Fellowship.
The 'How' and 'Why' of climate change, and its impacts on the surface of our planet, are Dr Gordon Bromley's broad areas of research interest. Dr Bromley employs a primarily glacial-geologic approach and a Big Picture vantage to reconstruct past change, information then used to better understand the present and inform projections of the future. Currently he is leading investigations in Antarctica, the tropical Andes, and the British Isles. A PhD graduate from the University of Maine, Dr Bromley was awarded the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Seal of Excellence in 2017.
Dr. Szegezdi is a key member of the Apoptosis Research Centre (ARC) at University of Galway which investigates mechanisms of cell death and cell stress and their relationship to human diseases. Deregulation of the cell death programme can result in diseases such as cancer, leukemias and neurodegenerative diseases. The ARC is developing strategies to intervene in the cell death programme to aid in the treatment of disease.
Dr. Szegezdi has secured over €1.5m in direct, competitive research funding. She is a Principal Investigator in the Blood Cancer Network Ireland initiative, a collaborative Cancer Research Centre jointly funded by SFI and the Irish Cancer Society, and hosted at University of Galway. In 2013, Eva was awarded a Science Foundation of Ireland Technology Innovation Development Award (TIDA), and in 2009, a SFI Starting Investigator Research Grant (SIRG). In 2009, Eva was also awarded an Irish Cancer Society Research Fellowship.