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Trinity Research 20152015

ContentsForeword from Dean of Research 1

Dark Stars in Inflammation: Astrocytes in the Neurodegenerating Brain 2

Marvel Molecule Could Lead to Treatments for Inflammatory Diseases 3

Scientific Tour de Force Signals Major Step for Structural Biology 4

How smart cities transform operations models: a new research agenda for operations management in the digital economy 5

Towards multifunctional lanthanide-based metal-organic frameworks 6

Smartsplint 7

Technological transformations in artistic practices 8

Inclusive Research in Irish Schools: A longitudinal study of special educational needs in Irish Schools 9

CONNECT Centre’s Pervasive Nation project 10

Google acquired virtual reality technology developed by Prof. Frank Boland’s group 11

The Censorship of British Theatre 1737-1843 12

Scientists Reveal Parchment’s Hidden Stories 13

A new idea to eliminate ‘Cancer Stem Cells’ 14

North Atlantic Fisheries - An Environmental History 15

Selection of Monographs and Books published 2015 16

Early Irish Manuscripts 18

Shaping Radical New Laws on Alcohol Labelling for Better Health 19

The Poetics of Wolves: Animals and the Human Condition in World Literature 20

A Novel Measurement of Upper Oesophageal Function (EndoFlip®) demonstrates clinical utility in evaluating patients who have had total laryngectomy 21

Hamilton Mathematics Institute awarded Simons Foundation grant 22

Largest genetic study published in schizophrenia could ‘kick start’ new approaches to treatment 23

Impacts of human activities on ecological systems 24

Mapping Winds and Dune Evolution on Mars 25

Exosomes as “mini-me” of the cells from where they come: bundles of biomarkers and messengers in cancer and other conditions 26

Designing switchable polarisation and magnetisation at room temperature in an oxide 27

Launch of Trinity IMpact Evaluation Unit (TIME) 28

Not Caring for Gender 29

Breakdown of university resources 30

Trinity Research Institutes 32

Trinity Research & Innovation 33

1

Foreword from Dean of Research It is my great pleasure to launch this new-look Dean of Research Report – an accessible slimline format that captures recent highlights and stories about research, innovation and impact at Trinity College Dublin. The report will be published twice annually and distributed widely in booklet and electronic format.

Trinity is a university of exceptional breadth and depth. This report covers a diverse range of activities – from exciting new discoveries and inventions which have led to innovative companies and products, to emergent policies that will shape Ireland, Europe and beyond, to expositions of the human condition and the creation of links between existing bodies of work that allow us to consider previous research in new ways. By its nature the report is illustrative but not comprehensive.

Research is an intensely social endeavor. Our research community is comprised not only of faculty, research students and staff, but involves industry and the local community and is supported by a network of collaborations and publications with researchers in over 140 countries around the globe.

The individual stories in this report are snapshots of the work going on every day at Trinity College Dublin – brief glimpses into the lives and work of our researchers. These successes and developments are the result of the passion, commitment and vision of people I am privileged to call my colleagues. While the report is intended to showcase Trinity’s research to the outside world, it will also help us to better understand and appreciate the breadth of scholarship that is being undertaken in this great university of ours and that this research is enabling real impact – social, cultural and economic.

I hope you will find this report of value and that you take the time to share some of our research stories with friends and colleagues both in Trinity and around the world.

John BolandDean of Research TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN


Dark Stars in Inflammation: Astrocytes in the Neurodegenerating Brain

It has become clear that inflammation in the brain (termed neuroinflammation) is intimately involved in most or all neurodegenerative conditions of the brain. Understanding the role of the major inflammatory cell populations of the brain will be crucial in mitigating effects and preserving function after acute insults like stroke and traumatic brain injury and during chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

One such population, astrocytes, which are named for their star-shaped appearance, function in healthy brains to assist with normal brain function and metabolism. However, the research group of Professor Colm Cunningham from Trinity’s School of Biochemistry & Immunology has now demonstrated that these cells play a major role in

the inflammatory hypersensitivity of the degenerating brain, by responding in an inappropriate and exaggerated fashion when stimulated by inflammation around them. These specialised astrocytes become ‘primed’ by the neurodegeneration of cells around them and later appear to abandon their posts as protectors of the brain, driving significant

and deleterious infiltration of inflammatory cells into the brain. This discovery has important implications for the management of neurodegenerative conditions such as stroke and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. These findings have been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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Marvel Molecule Could Lead to Treatments for Inflammatory Diseases

Over the past decade it has become increasingly clear that an ever-widening range of diseases have inflammation at their core. Known inflammatory diseases such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis and Muckle-Wells syndrome can have a debilitating impact on the lives of those affected by them. A new finding at Trinity could meet a major unmet clinical need by inspiring new non-invasive treatments for these diseases and a myriad of other inflammatory diseases.

Researchers at Trinity have uncovered a marvel molecule that blocks a key driver of inflammatory diseases. In a study published in the world’s leading preclinical medical journal Nature Medicine, the international research team led by Professor Luke O’Neill in the School of Biochemistry & Immunology at Trinity, in collaboration with the University of Queensland Australia, showed how the molecule MCC950 can suppress the ‘NLRP3 inflammasome’, which is an activator of the key process in inflammatory diseases. Inflammasomes have been identified as promising therapeutic targets by researchers over the last decade. Crucially, the finding confirms that inflammatory diseases all share a common process, even though the part of the body becoming inflamed might differ. The discovery of MCC950’s abilities represents a hugely significant development in the effort to find treatments for inflammatory diseases, for which current therapies are either highly ineffective or have major limitations.

Several pharmaceutical companies have been interested in targeting the NLRP3 pathway, and in particular a key output from it, the pro-inflammatory factor IL-1beta. MCC950 represents an exciting approach to achieve this and the possibility to develop the project commercially is being explored, the main aim being to form a spin-out company with the University of Queensland. Ultimately the discovery has the potential to be used to develop new medicines for diseases where the medical need is pressing, including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.


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Scientific Tour de Force Signals Major Step for Structural Biology

One of the challenges in treating serious disease lies in finding a balance between maximising the efficacy of drugs in combatting the disease while minimising the side effects for the person undergoing treatment. Researchers at Trinity have now found a new way to address this challenge.

In a major step for structural biology, a multi-institution scientific ‘tour de force’ has produced the first structural blueprint of a complex between ‘rhodopsin’, the light sensing protein in the retina, and one of its cellular signalling partners, ‘arrestin’. Rhodopsin is a pigment-powered protein that is extremely sensitive to light and enables us to see in low light conditions. It is also a G-protein coupled receptor (GCPR), which makes it a member of the largest family of cell-surface receptors in the body. Around one third of all currently used drugs target GCPRs. Recent advances in structural biology have pointed to specific signalling pathways dictating the way GCPRs like rhodopsin operate. This makes them of huge interest to drug developers, who hope to design drugs that selectively target unique elements of these specific pathways. If new drugs can be designed to work solely on their specific targets, patients receiving treatment should be considerably less likely to experience side effects, and the drugs themselves may also be more effective. Professor of Membrane Structural and Functional Biology at the School of Biochemistry & Immunology Martin Caffrey, and members of his research group, were collaborators whose ground-breaking work has been reported in the leading international journal Nature.

The rhodopsin-arrestin complex blueprint described in the Nature article is the first of its type to be solved at close to atomic resolution. It sets the stage for the many more such blueprints of different GPCR- signaling partner combinations needed to reveal the molecular details of how complexes form and the nature of their specific pairing. The constellation of chemical and structural hand-in-glove interactions where the partners meet will inform rational design of drugs that favour particular couplings thereby minimising side effects. Like a railroad switch directs a train safely along a particular route, these structure-inspired therapeutics specify which biological pathway or system is targeted when several are possible.

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How smart cities transform operations models: a new research agenda for operations management in the digital economy

The mass migration of people from rural to urban settings which began in the latter part of the 19th century is expected to reach 66% or 6.3 billion of the world’s population by 2050. Modern cities are noisy, congested, and challenging environments. Across the globe countries are looking to the development of smart cities to balance provision of services with the need of those living and working in urban environments.

A new study by researchers at Trinity College Dublin makes an important contribution to our understanding of how smart cities can transform operational models, and sets out a research agenda for operations management in smart cities that exploits the digital economy.

Smart cities are focused on the efficient use of digital and telecommunication technologies, integrating with ‘smart people’ and urban infrastructures, for the benefit of inhabitants and businesses. As smart cities develop their prominence in this digital economy, radically new approaches to managing business operations are now possible. Digitised infrastructures offer opportunities for public and private organisations to design and deliver more customer-centric products or services, particularly for those that require geographical proximity with consumers in the O2O (online to offline) context.

Professor Sinead Roden of the School of Business and collaborators have begun to develop and apply a framework to analyse a variety of cities’ experiences. These cases show how new models of organising city functions emerge, and how cities manage these new models. It addresses the issue of how scalable these are – does what works for a medium-sized European city necessarily map to megacities in Africa? What information is needed and what information emerges to aid in the management of “smart cities”? What issues emerge when we try to map consumers’ and citizens’ needs to the information needs? Most importantly, how feasible and how vulnerable to failure are each of the various models that emerge?

This study develops and uses a framework to analyse a range of city-based case examples. The cases outlined in the study illustrate the emergence of new operations models and demonstrate how smart cities are re-defining the characteristics of operations models around their scalability, the analytical output created and the connectivity with customers and information infrastructures. The researchers explore the feasibility, vulnerability and acceptability of each new operations model. As the prominence of smart cities continues to develop and stakeholder groups become increasingly knowledgeable and engaged, there is considerable incentive for operations managers across industry sectors to consider the opportunities and challenges facing their processes and people, as well as the tools and frameworks they deploy for strategic and operational decision-making. The opportunities are not only in improving efficiency and effectiveness of their existing operations, but also in transforming their operations models, and in some cases, developing radically different new ones.


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Towards multifunctional lanthanide-based metal-organic frameworks

The development of materials with porous frameworks is critical for a whole range of technologies; from catalysis, to separation to the ability to sequester carbon dioxide to combat climate change. Now researchers at Trinity have developed new materials technologies whose structures can be arbitrarily tuned for any particular application.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are fascinating metallo-supramolecular systems in which metal ions or polynuclear complexes are linked through organic ligands. Synthetic approaches to MOFs which consider the topological characteristics of these organic and inorganic secondary building units (SBUs) to rationally design ‘default’ structures, have attracted significant scientific interest over the last decades. Under this purview, the use of extended rigid organic linkers in combination with selected inorganic SBUs led for instance to highly augmented structures with surface areas exceeding 7000 m2/g, unprecedented gas storage capabilities or new heterogeneous catalysts with promising reactivity, turnover numbers/frequencies or shape/size selective properties.

A research team at Trinity led by Prof. Wolfgang Schmitt of the School of Chemistry has shown that lanthanide(Ln)-based MOFs are a particularly interesting subclass of MOFs as the intrinsic attributes of the heavy transition metal ions can lead to multi-functional materials which combine porosity, or other structural characteristics, with molecular magnetic, electronic, photo-physical attributes. The lanthanides are a unique family of homologous elements that resemble each other remarkably in their chemical attributes. The electronic configuration and associated energy levels of individual lanthanide ions within the homologous series facilitate the population of their excited states and minimised non-radiative deactivation pathways giving rise to characteristic narrow-line emission properties. These features promote their applications in self-assembly formations, as lamp phosphors, materials in biological assays and sensing, and as medical imaging systems or electro-luminescent materials in optical fibres and LEDs.

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Smartsplint

Tooth wear is a major cause of damage and tooth loss over time and the most common cause is bruxism (tooth grinding). Bruxism is a chronic condition that affects 8-20% of the population and falls within the spectrum of sleep disorders with characteristic changes in heart rate, respiration and muscle activity. However, because bruxism occurs during sleep, most sufferers are unaware it is happening until significant damage to their teeth has taken place. The diagnosis and monitoring of bruxism are recognised as major obstacles to the management of the condition. Researchers at Trinity are now developing a novel device to monitor this destructive condition.

Prof. Brian O’Connell and Dr Padraig McAuliffe from the School of Dental Science, along with Dr. Ramesh Babu in Trinity’s institute for nanotechnology, CRANN and the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering are developing a new medical device (SmartSplint) that measures tooth grinding during sleep. SmartSplint will be able to deliver up-to-date, personalised information about bruxism right to the patient’s phone and help them to understand their condition better and perhaps point to how they could modify their lifestyles to reduce how much they grind. Detailed data is also relayed to the care provider who can customise treatment for the individual. In addition, it is expected that the availability of SmartSplint will improve researchers’ understanding of the aetiology and progress of bruxism.

The project has raised over €700k in grant funding to date from EI, SFI and HRB. This has resulted in the formation of a spin-out company, SelfSense Technologies, which has secured an initial €100k investment from NDRC. The company is currently based in the NDRC building where it was selected to participate in the Venture Lab program for high potential startups. It will continue to work in close collaboration with the Dental Hospital and AMBER over the coming years, where there are world class research and clinical facilities.


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Technological transformations in artistic practices

Digital technologies are changing every aspect of modern life, and through the development of creative technologies are leading to a transformation in artistic practices.

The opportunities and challenges associated with digital technologies are highlighted in The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual, Towards the Real, edited by Matthew Causey, Emma Meehan, and Néill O’Dwyer. The book grew out of a collaboration between the Arts and Technology Research Lab (ATRL), the Digital Arts and Humanities PhD programme, and the Dublin Dance Festival. It contains essays by fourteen contributors who reflect on shifts in the maturing of digital culture, particularly as related to critical theory and artistic practices. The editors, Associate Professor in Drama at Trinity’s School of Drama, Film and Music and the Director

of ATRL Matthew Causey, Trinity alumna Emma Meehan, and PhD candidate Néill O’Dwyer describe ‘computational interference in all areas of life’ as a ‘new-normal’ in today’s society. Digital culture, they assert, has developed into a bio-virtual environment in which categories no longer separate the biological from the virtual. The contributors respond to questions raised by the ‘after-event’ of the digital through practice-led research analyses of performance processes, philosophical readings of the work of art and technology, and performance studies investigations of the subject in the spaces of technology. The volume examines a wide range of activities, from bio-art to internet

child pornography, gaming and social networking technologies to the use of motion-tracking in developing choreography and documentation. The authors draw from diverse perspectives in dance, theatre, performance, film and music studies, digital arts and culture.

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Inclusive Research in Irish Schools: A longitudinal study of special educational needs in Irish Schools

Providing suitable learning environments for students with special needs remains one of the greatest challenges facing education today. A research team led by Professor Michael Shevlin in the School of Education, through the Inclusive Research in Irish Schools Project, has undertaken a three-year longitudinal study into how school provision is addressing the special educational needs of students. This study is the largest ever European report into special and inclusive education, and involved over 150 students and their parents and school staff in mainstream and special schools around the country. Evidence gathered from the study indicated that schools generally demonstrated a commitment to providing an inclusive learning environment for children with special educational needs, through the establishment of skilled resource and learning support teachers, and positive communication between schools and parents. Transition planning between primary and post primary schools for pupils with special educational needs was generally well organised. However, the research also revealed significant barriers, including inadequacy of current assessment procedures to access resources, limited access to therapeutic services, insufficient teacher knowledge and expertise, inconsistencies in development and implementation of individual education plans, and exclusionary clauses in school enrolment policies. Key recommendations included the urgency of implementing fully the Education for Persons with Special Needs Act (2004), an inclusive assessment approach at national and school level, and further professional development.


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CONNECT Centre’s Pervasive Nation project

The key challenges that face society all drive the need for new and varied forms of networked services. These include mobile Internet, connected health, smart agriculture, smart grids and metering, and environmental monitoring services. The CONNECT Centre for Future Networks and Communications, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, focuses on future broadband, cellular and Internet-of-Things networks on which all of these services will be enabled, thereby growing the economy and supporting society at large. The centre, with total funding of about €50 million and including ten Irish research institutions and 37 industrial partners, is directed by Prof. Linda Doyle and headquartered in Trinity College Dublin.

The IDA describes Ireland as “small enough to test and yet big enough to prove ideas”. Pervasive Nation, which will start at ten Connect HEI locations, pushes this to the extreme through the ambitious development of IoT research activities at scale. Pervasive Nation is an Ireland-wide, wireless, network infrastructure dedicated to the Internet-of-Things (IoT). It will span urban, suburban and rural Ireland, supporting research and commercial activities. Uniquely, Pervasive Nation’s architecture will enable both experimental evaluations of early-stage technologies as well as supporting

mature prototype technologies, services and applications nearing operational deployment. The research infrastructure consists of a distributed set of IoT sensors, IoT-enabling radio base stations (and associated antennas), gateway servers enabling edge processing capabilities, solutions linking base station sites to a core IoT services datacentre, server capacity to host IoT resource management services and application-enabling software services. Among the applications to be investigated will be a Flood Management service across the Shannon Flood Basin, in collaboration with Intel.

Research areas include: low power radio access techniques for extreme numbers of devices, network function virtualisation, multi-tenancy for divergent verticals, cloud-based application-enabling platforms, device discovery and configuration.

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Google acquired virtual reality technology developed by Prof. Frank Boland’s group

Digital signal processing is one of the areas of excellence in the School of Engineering. Google has recently acquired virtual reality technology developed by engineers at Trinity. As part of the agreement, Google Ireland has recruited a team of four postgraduate engineers that developed the technology ‘Thrive’, a personal 3-D audio technology for virtual reality applications.

The Google acquisition of this new virtual technology is an example of how Trinity College Dublin is rejuvenating the Irish economy through research. Until now, the challenge of the delivery of audio that matches the visual experience in virtual technology has prevented the successful commercialisation of these technologies. Trinity engineers’ Thrive technology solves this problem, providing an overall experience that is more realistic.

Virtual reality is a media technology that will enable innovation in gaming, creative industries and in online learning, health sciences, product and environmental design. Companies such as Google are investing significantly in virtual reality and the Trinity Thrive technology and audio expertise will be used within Google’s growing activity in this area.

The team, led by Professor Frank Boland in the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering at Trinity’s School of Engineering, has been developing the Thrive technology for a number of years. The Thrive product development was supported by funding from Enterprise Ireland’s Commercialisation Fund. The audio signal processing research underpinning Thrive has been funded through State and industry grants and Trinity financed PhD studentships. This research continues with funding from Science Foundation Ireland Investigators Programme.


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Irishman Charles Macklin’s The Man of the World (1770) was the only play twice refused a license in the 18th century. It was eventually staged in 1781 with success. Huntington Library, Larpent MS 311.

The Censorship of British Theatre 1737-1843

In 1737 a piece of legislation was passed at Westminster which would remain on the statute books in one form or another until 1968. The Stage Licensing Act put censorship of the royal patent theatres, most notably Covent Garden and Drury Lane, under the control of the Lord Chancellor and his Examiner of Plays. Despite a burgeoning world of Enlightenment print culture, it has often been thought that the potential for theatre to question and probe contemporary political and societal mores was severely curtailed.

The project, led by David O’Shaughnessy of Trinity’s School of English, surveys the first century of this regime until the Theatres Act of 1843. A selection of manuscripts drawn from important collections at the Huntington Library in California and the British Library are being scanned and edited for a public access website. Once completed, this resource will offer scholars an opportunity to study the phenomenon of theatre censorship in unprecedented detail and to assess the capacity of theatre, so important to Georgian culture, to reflect critically on society. Scholars will be able to map how theatrical responses to matters political, economic, and moral evolved – or not – over the course of the long eighteenth century.

The project has a number of valuable aspects. Firstly, it will allow scholars to compare performance texts with published versions. While censorship of plays in performance was quite strict,

there was no pre-publication censorship of printed materials (although one could be charged with sedition after the fact). This will allow us to make more informed assessments of a particular playwright’s political inclinations as well as his or her willingness to accept changes imposed by the Examiner of Plays for the published version. Moreover, it will also allow us to trace societal changes in attitude over the course of the period covered and demonstrate how, for instance, times of war and political instability led to a stricter censorship regime. Finally, there is enormous benefit in making available the manuscripts through high quality colour scans: it is notoriously difficult to make judgements on who precisely is making textual excisions/emendations – it might be the Examiner but it also might well be the playhouse manager, keen to keep his business away from controversy, or even the author, thinking better of a point made in haste. And, of course, it is not

always clear whether a particular excision was made for reasons of censorship or for dramaturgical purpose. When the resource is launched, scholars around the world will be finally in a position to make those decisions for themselves using this corpus. Finally, the resource will make available a number of important plays that were never published or are not available in current databases or scholarly editions.

In 2015 David O’Shaughnessy became the first Irish academic to be awarded a Huntington Conference Grant ($25,000), an award which will help disseminate the findings of this project.

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Scientists Reveal Parchment’s Hidden Stories

Millions of documents stored in archives across the globe could provide scientists with the key to tracing agricultural development across the centuries. Locked within is the potential to understanding agricultural methods and their influence on animal husbandry, changing climatic conditions and even the development and spread of modern civilisations.

Thanks to increasingly progressive genetic sequencing techniques, the all-important historical tales these documents tell are no longer confined to their texts; now, vital information also comes from the DNA of the parchment on which they are written. Researchers at Trinity College Dublin and the University of York used these state-of-the-art scientific techniques to extract ancient DNA and protein from tiny samples of parchment from documents from the late 17th and late 18th centuries. The resulting information enabled them to establish the type of animals from which the parchment was made, which, when compared to genomes of their modern equivalents, provides key information as to how agricultural expansion shaped the genetic diversity of these animals.

This information therefore gives the scientists an unrivalled resource to analyse the development of livestock husbandry across the centuries. The research has just been published in the international, peer-reviewed journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

The team was led by Professor Daniel Bradley of Population Genetics in the School of Genetics and Microbiology at Trinity College Dublin, and Professor Matthew Collins of the Department of Archaeology at York.

Trinity researchers extracted DNA from two tiny (2x2cm) samples of parchment provided by the University of York’s Borthwick Institute for Archives. Meanwhile, researchers in the Centre for Excellence in Mass Spectrometry at York extracted collagen (protein) from the same parchment samples. The first sample showed a strong affinity with northern Britain, specifically the region in which black-faced breeds such as Swaledale, Rough Fell and Scottish Blackface are common, whereas the second sample showed a closer affinity with the Midlands and southern Britain where the livestock improvements of the later 18th century were most active.

If other parchments show similar levels of DNA content, the resulting sequencing could provide insights into the breeding history of livestock – particularly sheep – before, during and after the agricultural improvements of the 18th century that led to the emergence of regional breeds of sheep in Britain. This study has provided a first glimpse into how human change affected the genetics of sheep through the ages and in turn how agricultural practices evolved.

This pilot project demonstrates that parchments are an amazing potential resource for genetic studies that consider agricultural development over the centuries. There are millions of similar parchments stored away in libraries, archives, solicitors’ offices and even in our own attics. Parchment was the writing material of choice for thousands of years, going back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, so there is enormous scope for future studies of this kind.

The research was funded by a grant from the European Research Council.

Prof. Dan Bradley preparing a bone sample for DNA extraction


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A new idea to eliminate ‘Cancer Stem Cells’

Often, treating a cancer patient with chemotherapy or radiation doesn’t work out as planned. The tumour shrinks at first, but the cancer stem cells within the tumour can survive and eventually seed the growth of new, more aggressive cancers. A key feature of the ability of cancer stem cells to survive these standard cancer treatments is that they predominantly exist in a dormant or non-dividing state, called ‘cellular quiescence’, while the treatments are most effective against dividing cells.

Therefore, a key challenge in medicine is to develop a means to target cancer stem cells and knock them out of their dormant quiescent state so they can then be killed by standard cancer therapies. A significant breakthrough addressing this challenge has been made by scientists from the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin. The Trinity research group, led by Dr. Adrian Bracken, has just published their findings, which feature on the cover of November’s issue of the leading international journal, Genes and Development.

The research encompasses multiple disciplines including cancer cell biology, computer-predictive chemistry and evolutionary genetics. The study’s lead author, Dr. Gerard Brien, demonstrated that a protein

normally involved in regulating cellular identity, Polycomb-Like Protein 1 (PCL1), binds to and boosts the function of the p53 protein, one of the most famous cancer associated proteins, and that this is required for the ability of p53 to activate cellular quiescence. Dr Elisa Fadda, in the NUI Maynooth’s Department of Chemistry, was instrumental in pin-pointing the structural basis of how PCL1 and p53 interact. She used molecular modelling to identify two unique portions of PCL1 that allow it to boost p53 function. Then, together with Prof. Aoife McLysaght, also at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, the groups were able to determine that these minor differences in PCL1, compared to its sister protein PCL2 and PCL3, emerged during the recent evolution of mammals.

The discovery that PCL1 has acquired a new function during the relatively recent evolution of mammals is very interesting, but the realisation that this involves it teaming up with the famous p53 protein represented an important breakthrough in the field of cancer biology. The researchers are now exploiting this new knowledge to develop a strategy to target cancer stem cells by knocking them out of their dormant state thereby making them more amenable to standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The research was supported by funding from Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Cancer Society Collaborative Cancer Research Centre, Breast-Predict.

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North Atlantic Fisheries - An Environmental History

In 1497, John Cabot returned to Bristol from a voyage across the North Atlantic. He told of waters so thick with fish that they could be lifted straight on board in baskets. Within a few years, fishermen from all over Western Europe made the journey across the Atlantic. This was the beginning of the Fish Revolution of the early-modern world.

Professor Poul Holm, Professor of Environmental History at the School of Histories and Humanities has been awarded a prestigious Advanced Grant of €2.5 million by the European Research Council to explore the North Atlantic fish revolution, c.1400-1700 AD. The Fish Revolution was one of the first examples of the disrupting effects of globalisation and climate change. Fish was a high-priced, limited resource in the Late Middle Ages. The Grand Banks fishery offered abundant high-quality low-priced catches to the European market. At the same time, the climate worsened as the Little Ice Age drove down sea temperatures and changed marine ecosystems.

The consequences were dire for fishermen along the coasts from the Irish Sea right up to Northern Norway. As they caught less cod locally at higher prices, the fishermen had the choice of migrating across the ocean or give up fishing. Many fishing settlements were deserted as inhabitants took to the road to seek casual work in agriculture or in towns.

Kings and high politics were similarly affected by the ‘fish revolution’. The new resource held strategic importance for all major western European powers, such as Spain, England and France. North Atlantic warfare during this period was as much about fish as about gold.

In recent years we have all been affected by the impact of global change. This project will seek to untangle the drivers of prices and temperatures to explain the causes of the fish revolution. It will also explore how people understood and responded to the challenges of globalisation and climate change. Perhaps the fish revolution is a distant mirror for today.


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Selection of Monographs and Books published 2015

Cover image: RF123

781849 4667079

ISBN 978-1-84946-670-7

781849 4667079

ISBN 978-1-84946-670-7

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FOOD LAW

European, Domestic and International Frameworks

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MacM

aoláin

This book provides a broad conspectus on the application of EU and international regulation of the food sector on English law. It is aimed at practitioners and students of this vital and emerging branch of law, which has become an important part of current political and legal debate. It is written not just for lawyers as a statement of current law, but is also aimed at all those involved or interested in the food industry who wish to familiarise themselves with how the law is applied practically in this jurisdiction. The book commences with a short conceptual framework for the study of food law. It then provides a comprehensive and up-to-date account of current English law, explaining fully the detailed processes by which both international and national law and EU decision making have impacted upon most aspects of the production, sale and consumption of food in England. The book explains and assesses the operation of the current law by describing in detail the roles of Government, the Food Standards Agency and local enforcement authorities in the making and enforcing of laws concerning food. The work contains full outlines of the developments in the most significant areas of food law. It concentrates specifically on topics such as food labelling and advertising, quality and compositional requirements, geographical food names, genetic modification, organic production, animal welfare and also the role of law in tackling poor health, obesity, and diet-related disease. The book, though primarily designed as a law text, goes beyond the usual confines of such works. It sets out to explain and describe the impact of successive food crises, such as BSE and the use of horsemeat in beef products, on food safety and transparency requirements. The book considers and assesses how the existing rules on the chemical and biological safety of food impact on our law, and concludes with a review of the developing legal issues concerning the environmental impacts of current and proposed food law, in particular the relationship between food law, climate change and food security.

Caoimhín MacMaoláin is a Lecturer in Law at Trinity College, Dublin.

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Selection of Monographs and Books published 2015


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Early Irish Manuscripts

The Early Irish manuscripts project is a partnership between the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Library, Trinity College Dublin, funded by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BoAML) Art Conservation Scheme.

Alongside Ireland’s greatest cultural artefact, the Book of Kells, Trinity holds six other related pre-ninth-century manuscripts, four of which are little known and seldom displayed due to their condition. Generous funding from BoAML has permitted the project partners to conserve, digitise and display these internationally significant texts. Together with making digital surrogates of the manuscripts available online, a weekly blog documents progress in all aspects of the research, from the results of pigment analysis, to the history and folklore of the manuscripts. In tandem with academic publication, the project aims to make these internationally significant artefacts more accessible to the general public both online, and in the planned new ‘Treasures’ exhibition at Trinity.

While this work will be completed by August 2016, its legacy will be present for years to come not only in the stabilisation of the manuscripts, but also in its contribution to scholarship of the period for which Irish art is justifiably internationally famous, and the presentation of those findings to scholars, students and tourists who visit Trinity College. The success of this holistic approach has provided a template for future philanthropic partnerships, combining the preservation, research and teaching roles of the University to raise awareness of the internationally important treasures in its collections and enhance the visitor experience to one of Ireland’s premier cultural tourism attractions.

Project leaders: Dr Rachel Moss, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art. Her teaching and research focus on Irish Medieval art. Publications include The Art and Architecture of Ireland. Volume1, Medieval Period (Royal Irish Academy and Yale University Press, Dublin, London and New Haven, 2014), Art and Devotion in Late Medieval Ireland (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2006), Making and Meaning in Insular Art (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2007).

Susan Bioletti is Keeper of Preservation and Conservation in the Library. She has particular expertise in the analysis of works of art, particularly pigments and paper supports, and the impact of pollutants in cultural heritage buildings.

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Shaping Radical New Laws on Alcohol Labelling for Better Health

According to the WHO, Europeans have the highest alcohol intake in the world. Alcohol is a toxic substance in terms of its direct and indirect effects on a wide range of body organs and a cause of some 60 diseases. It is the 3rd risk factor in Europe for ill health and non-communicable diseases including some cancers, cardiovascular disease and is a major risk factor for neuropsychiatric disorders. Further, excessive alcohol use during a woman’s pregnancy can lead to severe mental handicap of her child. Despite this, however, alcoholic beverages are not subject to the same regulatory labelling regime as other foodstuffs and no labelling laws currently exist in any EU country.

At Trinity, researchers are leading the change in this area; Dr Caoimhín MacMaoláin in the School of Law is spearheading an interdisciplinary group of graphic designers, social scientists, political scientists, health scientists and consumer behaviour experts to investigate the legal aspects of introducing health warnings and other labelling requirements for alcoholic products. A Public Health Alcohol Bill is currently making its way through the Dáil and Seanad in spite of heavy opposition from up to a dozen EU states and reservations from the policy-guiding EU Commission, which have all expressed objections to introducing any new rules that labels must carry a health warning and a calorie count. Dr MacMaoláin’s project, in conjunction with Amárach Research and the Department of Health, is providing advice to the Government on ways in which the law can be used to address public health concerns arising out of the over-consumption of alcohol.


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The Poetics of Wolves: Animals and the Human Condition in World Literature

In his book, The Poetics of Wolves, Dr Peter Arnds from the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies at Trinity undertakes pioneering research that shows both a multidisciplinary academic and a wider public audience how myths and their biological metaphors in different cultures impact the biopolitical treatment of humans and the artistic representation of such treatment.

Myth and metaphor are important vehicles through which we communicate and learn about the world around us. In many cultures animal forms were used to symbolise and demonise people and behaviours; the vestiges of these traditions persist even today. Dr Arnds examines the uses of myth and metaphor in world literature for the representation of trauma arising from political violence and human rights violations. The Poetics of Wolves analyses

the uses of canine metaphors and their varying literary-mythological developments for the purpose of representing human abjection in its various manifestations, including exile, expulsion, abandonment, illegal immigration, crime, imprisonment, and annihilation. The book project changes the ways in which we think about metaphors and myths, while engaging with disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, political science and medicine. Key objectives of the research include

writing a seminal monograph on canine metaphors in the context of racism and biopolitics in world literature. Part of this work will also include an exhibit that will feature a digital map highlighting the history and literary use of canine metaphors. This exhibit could then travel between science galleries in Europe and other parts of the world, and target a broad age demographic to raise awareness of the use of animal metaphors in the language of racism.

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A Novel Measurement of Upper Oesophageal Function (EndoFlip®) demonstrates clinical utility in evaluating patients who have had total laryngectomy

Dysphagia (defined as a difficulty eating, drinking and swallowing) presents in 5% of the general adult population. Common causes include stroke, Parkinson’s disease and head and neck cancer. People with dysphagia are often unable to swallow safely or efficiently, leading to clinical complications such as pneumonia, weight loss and dehydration. A common feature of dysphagia is impaired opening of the upper oesophageal sphincter (UES). This prevents food and drinks from passing safely through the pharynx (throat) into the oesophagus (gullet).

EndoFLIP is a new measurement of upper oesophageal sphincter dysfunction devised by Professor Julie Regan with Professor Barry McMahon (Dept Bioengineering) and Professor Margaret Walshe. This device is the first of its kind internationally to measure upper oesophageal sphincter dysfunction. This device was evaluated in terms of safety of positioning and accuracy of measurement in the pharyngo-oesophageal segment (PES) in adults with known PES dysfunction; a cohort of people who had their larynx removed due to head and neck cancer. Preliminary measurements of PES distensibility and opening during swallowing were determined in 10 adults post total laryngectomy (61–75 years) recruited from an outpatient ENT clinic. EndoFLIP was inserted trans-nasally, and the balloon was positioned in the PES. EndoFLIP provided novel quantitative information regarding PES distensibility and opening during swallowing in adults post total laryngectomy. No adverse events were observed in this first clinical study and data were easy to acquire. Based on this research from the School of Linguistic, Speech & Communication Sciences, clinicians now have a new and precise measure of existing interventions to alter PES tone.


21

Hamilton Mathematics Institute awarded Simons Foundation grant

Mathematics captures the essence of pure thought and is the natural language of the world around us. Its application to the physical and life sciences as well as to medicine, economics has a deep impact on the development of society and our daily lives. Trinity has long been recognised for its world-class Mathematics researchers. Recently, the Hamilton Mathematics Institute (HMI) at Trinity College Dublin has been awarded a grant to develop a Simons Distinguished Visiting Professor, Simons Visitor Scholar and a Simons Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme by the Simons Foundation, based in the United States. The Simons Foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. The foundation exists to support discovery-driven scientific research, undertaken in pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world.

The HMI and the Trinity School of Mathematics are closely aligned and the institute is co-located within the School building. The HMI Director, Professor Samson Shatashvili holds the University Chair in Natural Philosophy (1847). The grant was awarded through the Simons Foundation’s programme of ‘Targeted Grants to Institutes’ to support centres of excellence in the mathematics and physical sciences by providing funding to establish

scientific culture and strengthen contacts within the international scientific community. The Simons Foundation funds two to three institutions annually and the HMI joins an elite group of mathematical institutes that are supported in this way.

The School of Mathematics at Trinity has a long history of excellence, stretching back to William Rowan Hamilton, Ireland’s most famous mathematician whose ideas continue to have impact today. It was Hamilton’s work on mechanics that laid the foundations for modern quantum mechanics and his abstract, curiosity-driven mathematics research that led to the discovery of quaternions – used today in satellite dynamics and navigation as well as computer graphics.

Today the School’s research interests include analysis, algebra and theoretical physics (including string theory, quantum field theory and particle physics).

Theoretical physicists in the School are using supercomputers in the US and Europe to understand the strong nuclear force that binds fundamental particles called quarks and gluons inside the protons and neutrons that make up all matter around us. The quantum theory of this strong force is called Quantum

Chromodynamics (QCD) and researchers in the field have been at the forefront of innovations in algorithms and hardware design. Trinity research in this area also feeds into the physics programme at the LHC in CERN.

This work has attracted international attention; researchers have presented invited plenary talks describing their work at international conferences in the US, Europe and China and delivered lectures at international graduate schools in the US and Europe.

A knowledge economy requires a workforce comfortable with the ideas and applications of mathematics. It also requires Irish researchers, like those at Trinity, who are engaged at the highest international standards. Curiosity-driven research sets out to answer fundamental questions about nature, patterns and symmetries, usually with no real-world application in mind. Experience has shown, however, that new and unexpected advances almost always follow, with positive and lasting impacts for society.

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Largest genetic study published in schizophrenia could ‘kick start’ new approaches to treatment

Schizophrenia is a mysterious brain disorder for which there have been no new innovations in treatment for the last 60 years. Research from the School of Medicine at Trinity is now shedding light on this devastating condition. As part of a multinational, collaborative effort, Aiden Corvin and Michael Gill from the School have helped to find more than a hundred locations in the human genome associated with risk of developing schizophrenia. Multiple genes and pathways identified through this research are pointing to biological mechanisms that underlie schizophrenia. As expected, the study identifies genes expressed in brain tissue, particularly those related to neuronal and synaptic function. This includes the gene DRD2 that encodes the dopamine receptor, targeted by all currently approved medications for schizophrenia. What is new is that many of the genes involved are active in pathways controlling synaptic plasticity – a function essential to learning and memory – and pathways governing postsynaptic activity, such as calcium channels, which are involved in signaling between cells in the brain. The work also supports a suspected link between schizophrenia and immunological processes as a number of immune genes appear to be involved. These findings offer opportunities to explore novel therapeutic targets with the goal of developing better treatments.


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Impacts of human activities on ecological systems

The global decline of bees and other pollinating insects has raised concerns about pollination deficits and potential risks to world food production. Decline is driven by a range of processes, including the widespread use of pesticides. Some of these pesticides can end up in the nectar and pollen of plants, and thus become incorporated into bee diets.

A team of researchers at Trinity College Dublin and Newcastle University has found that bees are attracted to food containing common pesticides. This observation has revealed for the first time the increased risk of exposure of bees to high levels of pesticides. Previous studies have suggested that exposure of this kind can affect bees’ fitness.

The research, published in the leading international peer-reviewed journal Nature, discovered that buff-tailed bumblebees and honeybees could not taste the three most commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides and so did not avoid them. In fact, the bees showed a preference for food which contained pesticides: when the bees were given a choice between sugar solution, and sugar solution containing neonicotinoids, they chose the neonicotinoid-laced food.

The lab-based study also showed that the bumblebees ate more of the food containing pesticides than the honeybees, and so were exposed to higher doses of toxins. The team was led by Professor

Jane Stout of Botany in the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, and Professor Geraldine Wright at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University.

Bees and other pollinating insects are important for increasing crop yields – their value has been estimated to be worth at least €153billion per year globally. When pollinating crops, they can be exposed to pesticides in floral nectar and pollen. Several studies have shown that neonicotinoids have negative effects on bee foraging and colony fitness. As a result, public concern has grown over the impact of neonicotinoids on bees and other pollinators. In April 2013, the EU introduced a temporary ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides on flowering crops, while further scientific and technical evidence was gathered. That evidence is now under review.

The findings in this study imply that even if alternative food sources are provided for bees in agricultural landscapes where neonicotinoid pesticides are used, the bees may prefer to forage on

the neonicotinoid-contaminated crops. Since neonicotinoids can also end up in wild plants growing adjacent to crops, they could be more prevalent in bees’ diets than previously thought.

Neonicotinoids target the same mechanisms in the bee brain that are affected by nicotine in the human brain, and they may make foods containing these substances appear more rewarding to the bees. If this changes their foraging in favour of neonicotinoid-contaminated food, this could have negative implications for individuals, colonies, populations and communities of bees.

The study was funded by Science Foundation Ireland, the Irish Research Council, and the National Science Foundation. It is also part of the Insect Pollinators Initiative, which is jointly funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Defra, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Scottish Government and the Wellcome Trust under the auspices of the Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) partnership.

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Mapping Winds and Dune Evolution on Mars

As humankind continues its exploration of the solar system through manned and unmanned space expeditions it has becoming increasingly important to better understand the climatic conditions that exist on distant planets. A team of scientists from Trinity, the University of Ulster and Flinders University have addressed this head-on. Working from a distance of some 225 million km away, the team has demonstrated that it is possible to model the wind conditions over dunes on the planet Mars using the shape of sand dunes.

This project illustrates how even the most challenging problems can be addressed thorough international collaboration. Prof. Mary Bourke’s research at the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity had focussed on the effect of surface winds on Mars to establish a suite of morphological indicators that can be used to indicate the magnitude and frequency of winds on the surface of the planet. Although validation of these findings was possible by numerical modelling, the impact was limited by the low resolution of available atmospheric models. The research group at the University of Ulster led by Professor Jackson had recently published a series of papers that demonstrated the development of higher resolution atmospheric models that could be deployed over topographic models of aeolian dunes on Earth. The two teams collaborated to deploy the high resolution model over topographic models of aeolian dunes on Mars. The model data revealed the development of complex wind patterns. The model output was validated using the direction and rate of aeolian wind ripple migration that were measured on the flanks of Martian dunes. The work, published in Nature Communications is of vital importance, not only for understanding the evolution of sand dunes on Mars, but also for learning how the wind condition can affect the ability to land new spacecraft on the Red Planet, or when high winds kick up around our current Rovers on Mars.


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Exosomes as “mini-me” of the cells from where they come: bundles of biomarkers and messengers in cancer and other conditions

Every hour someone in Ireland dies from cancer. Cancer therapy is not a one-size-fits-all. Some tumours initially respond to a selected treatment, but go on to develop resistance. For some cancers, suitable therapeutics drugs have not yet been found. Minimally-invasive ways i.e. simple blood tests for cancer diagnosis and treatment monitoring are needed; a better understanding of how cancer cells communicate to initiate metastasis and drug-resistance is needed; and smarter drug-delivery systems are needed. Mounting evidence suggests that exosomes will be key players in addressing these unmet needs.

Researchers in the School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences recently made a discovery that nano-sized (30-120nm) vesicles released from cancer cells, and known as exosomes, are highly informative of the contents and activity of their cells of origin. Led by Lorraine O’Driscoll, Associate Professor of Pharmacology, these observations included triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) i.e. the form of breast cancer that is strongly associated with younger women, is highly aggressive, and for which no targeted therapy has been found. Initially studying laboratory models of human tumours and then confirming the clinical relevance in patients’ specimens, they observed that all of the cancer cells’ controlling microRNAs that were most substantially blocked in aggressive breast cancer cells originate from the same DNA chromosome region. The loss of these microRNAs was reflected in the cargo of exosomes released from these cells. This supports exosomes having benefits as bundles of cancer biomarkers.

Furthermore, in efforts to “reverse” cancer cells’ aggressiveness and as proof-principle that exosomes may have potential as “nano-delivery vehicles” for therapeutics, one of the lost microRNAs (miR-134) was re-introduced by engineering exosomes. Subsequent uptake of these miR-134-loaded exosomes quelled the cancer cells’ aggressiveness, reducing their uncontrolled growth, and increased their sensitivity to anti-cancer drugs.

The outcome of this research gives hope that not only can exosomes act as minimally-invasive biomarkers, but also as nano-sized delivery vehicles. Furthermore, administering miR-134 may be a useful therapeutic strategy to decrease TNBC aggressiveness and overcome drug-resistance, helping to address a very substantial unmet need.

The findings were recently published in Oncotarget. This work, together with the groups’ other studies of exosomes in cancer lead to an invited review of Exosomes and Ectosomes in Cancer in New England Journal of Medicine [impact factor 55.873].

Furthermore, the experience, know-how, and technologies established by the group in Trinity over the past 8 years are directly relevant to studies of exosomes and other extracellular vesicles in many pathological (e.g. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, diabetes, arthritic) and physiological conditions (e.g. breast milk’s contribution to infant’s immune system, sports performance).

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Designing switchable polarisation and magnetisation at room temperature in an oxide

Magnetism has been at the heart of information storage technology for well over half a century and still dominates the bulk storage market, in the form of hard-disk drives used in server farms. However, information in computers is stored on a number of different levels, and some of them need to be non-volatile, fast and energy efficient, at the same time. The proposed magnetic solution to these demands for the last two decades has been magnetic random access memory (MRAM), which involves the reorientation of nanometrically sized magnetic regions by means of relatively large electrical currents. An alternative is the use of ferroelectric, rather than ferromagnetic, materials and therefore the storage of information in atomic-scale electrical charges (dipole moments). This is far less power-hungry, but suffers from problems related to material fatigue due to the relatively large local deformations (strain) developed in ferroelectric materials upon charging. In the last decade there have been a number of attempts to get the best from both worlds and merge the fields of ferromagnetic and ferroelectric storage.

The teams at the University of Liverpool and at Trinity College Dublin have worked on a particular strategy, involving the combination of magnetic and electric orders in the same material, dubbed intrinsic multi-ferroic behavior. A new complex oxide has been developed (1-x)BiTi(1-y)/2FeyMg(1-y)/2O3–(x)CaTiO3, which demonstrates the complete functionality stemming from the combination of both electrical and magnetic orders at room temperature, and their interaction. This material, designed at UL and characterised at Trinity’s School of Physics by a team led by Plamen Stamenov, may, indeed, enable the development of low energy computer memory technologies. The advantage is not just in the doubling of the information storage capacity,but rather comes about via the ability to control magnetic moments directly via electrical signals. This circumvents the main problem with the magnetic case, where writing the information is energy-intensive and the main one in electric case, where reading in destructive (involved a re-write) which is energy intensive.

As materials with both electrical and magnetic order at room temperature are hard to engineer because of the conflicting and competing requirements of different crystal and electronic structures, there are three distinct steps in the prove of any new candidate material. For applications, it is absolutely critical to not only be able to demonstrate both orders at and above room temperature but also the coupling between them. The work reported in Nature is a new design approach that Crystal structure, magnetic percolation and the morphotropicphase boundary (MPB) in in a bulk perovskite oxide promises to allow the synthesis and tuning of composition between two families of materials. This new design approach is shown to overcome the difficulties and proven to exhibit magnetic and electric order as well as strong coupling between them, at and above room temperature, in the bulk. The efforts of both research teams are now focused on the development of this new material family in a thin film form directly applicable in electronic devices.


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Launch of Trinity IMpact Evaluation Unit (TIME)

The Department of Economics in Trinity’s School of Social Sciences and Philosophy launched a new research group called the Trinity IMpact Evaluation Unit (TIME) in September 2015. TIME brings together researchers in economics and other academic disciplines working on micro-economic impact evaluations, development practitioners, and policy makers in a collective effort to understand the impact of development aid investments. It aims to contribute to the global knowledge base on the processes of economic development and the underlying causal mechanisms. In particular, TIME’s vision is to provide strong evidence of what works, so that better investments that have real impact on the development process can be made.

A number of research projects are currently being undertaken by the TIME group. The Nourish Project assesses the impact of nutritional information campaigns, nutrition training courses and women in business empowerment campaigns on the lives of 4,000 women in 32 rural HIV clinics in Uganda. Another project assesses the impact of solar lamps on the educational performance of 300 pupils in off-grid areas in rural Kenya. Researchers found that solar lamps improve the grades of both the students the received the lamp and of those that didn’t

thanks to spillover effects. A third project evaluates the role technology can play in the success of savings groups; this project focuses on 3,600 members of savings groups in Kenya who are using an e-recording device to record savings transactions.

In addition to the production of research of the highest academic standard, TIME will also facilitate the dissemination of research more widely and provide training to development practitioners on rigorous methods of impact evaluation.

TIME is based in the Department of Economics, School of Social Sciences and Philosophy. There are five founding members, Prof. Fadi Hassan, Prof. Michael King, Prof. Tara Mitchell, Prof. Gaia Narciso and Prof. Carol Newman.

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Not Caring for Gender

In Ireland, the family continues to be the primary source of care for children and older adults, with most care provided by women. But not all women are equally involved in caring. While researching solidarity between generations in Ireland, Trinity researchers interviewed 52 women aged 18 to 102 years and heard about important changes that women are initiating to the place of care in their lives.

Women’s capacity to negotiate the place of care in their lives differed depending on the resources available to them and their families. In low-income families, young women grow up witnessing parents, especially mothers, sustaining the family with meagre resources and suffering strain. They see close up their family’s needs for help and support and they assume responsibility for meeting those needs by direct care giving early on in their lives. Getting involved in caregiving may mean giving up other opportunities in order to be a resource to the family. Growing up in middle or higher income families means witnessing less need for help and support within the family and across family generations. As a consequence, young women in these better-off families forge a sense of having freedom to pursue diverse opportunities in education, employment and other self-directed pursuits. This is facilitated by the security of knowing that the care needs that may arise for older family members can be met by purchasing care services using the family’s financial resources. In these families, emotional support rather than care labour is the principal input from younger family members.

Older women meanwhile are taking a critical view of how caring constrains women’s lives. They observe the multiple roles and demands on younger women and temper their own expectations of receiving family care accordingly. Witnessing younger women in the family combining paid employment and childrearing, older women respond by withholding expectations of help, support, or care from them. Higher income older women instead look to any available public (health and social care) supports and privately purchased services to provide for their anticipated care needs. In tandem with initiating change to the place of care work in the lives of younger women, older women are renegotiating the place of care in their own later lives by for instance withholding or limiting their involvement in grandchild care. By signaling limited availability to care for grandchildren, older women initiate a break in practices of reciprocation, and free their daughters from the obligation to provide elder care.

Just as interdependence and reciprocity in giving and receiving support characterised intergenerational family relations for women in lower socioeconomic groups, being freed from care obligations was playing out as a reciprocating process among family generations of women in middle and higher socioeconomic groups. Reciprocity in caring relations is therefore taking a new shape. Older women are initiating changes to the place of care in their later lives and, by extension, in the lives of younger women in their families through new processes of reciprocation where withholding, for example, grandchild care is reciprocated by withholding of expectations or demands for elder care. Freedom from extensive care obligations is a new form of reciprocity among (higher income) women across family generations and involves ‘undoing gender’. Catherine Conlon and Virpi Timonen from the School of Social Work & Social Policy, together with co-authors Gemma Carney and Thomas Scharf published “Women (Re)Negotiating Care Across Family Generations: Intersections of Gender and Socioeconomic Status,” in the Number-One ranking journal Gender & Society.


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Total Expenditure

SFI

EUHRB

IRC

HEA

IRISH GOVERNMENT/STATE AGENCY

CHARITY

ENTERPRISE IRELAND

OTHER NON EXCHEQUER

INDUSTRY

2014-15

ACADEMIC Staff (exclud postdoc) 676.54

Of which women 282.26

Of which International 274.2

RESEARCH Only 430.84

Total STUDENTS (FTE) 15804.5

Of which international 3945.5

Of which women 9118.5

Number of Bachelor Students (2016) 11051.5

UG degrees awarded 2640

MASTERS Students - new student intake* (new 2012) N/A

Number of Masters Students (2016) 1769.5

Number of Doctoral Students (2016) 1469

Doctorates awarded 366

INSTITUTIONAL Income €335m

RESEARCH Income €111m

Research income from industry and commerce €5m

Patents filed 18

Inventions Disclosed 53

Spinout Companies 3

Patents granted 16

License agreements 23

Number of research agreements with industry 110 (59 <25K€ and 51>25K€)

Source 2014/15

SFI 34,786,616

EU 18,452,425

HRB 7,162,002

Irish Research Council 6,657,538

HEA 4,574,267

Irish Government / State Agency

4,152,454

Charity 4,117,566

Enterprise Ireland 3,942,179

Other Non-Exchequer 3,917,631

Industry 5,268,749

Total 93,031,428

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ERC Awards from H2020 to date2015 Publications

Trinity

Trinity – 10NUIG– 6

NUIM– 1

RCSI– 1

UCC– 2

UCD– 4

NUIG

NUIM

RCSI

UCC

UCD

No. of outputs* 3310

No. of monographs/books* 79

No. of journal articles** 1835

Impact of these outputs i.e. journal articles – how many were in the world top 10% in 2015*** 215 [11.72%]

* data from TCD RSS (for all outputs and for monographs/books)

** includes review articles*** data from Thomson Reuters InCites

200

100

08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15

703CollaborationAgreements

1800+North America

7500+Europe

400+Asia

60+Africa

450+Australia

80+South America

World Map - Global research collaborations

Industry Collaborations 2008-2015


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Trinity Research Institutes

Trinity has four large-scale research institutes; TBSI, CRANN, TLRH and TCIN. These research entities harness the excellence of our individual academics to create a critical mass of researchers working in concert to address common research questions of global consequence. Trinity’s research institutes have significant research reputations internationally and increase the impact of Trinity’s research outputs.

The Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI) was the most ambitious construction project in Trinity’s history. The €131 million eleven-storey development (35,000m2) creates a corridor of academic activity and public interaction along Pearse Street. This collaborative research space will further develop Trinity’s leadership position in immunology, neuroscience and cancer, and will facilitate a step-change in the level and impact of research in this field.

The Naughton Institute is a €100 million state-of-the-art science facility at Trinity and houses Ireland’s first purpose-built nanoscience research institute, the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN). Researchers and scientists at the Institute work at the frontiers of nanoscience developing new knowledge of nanoscale materials, with a particular focus on new device and sensor technologies for the ICT, biotechnology and medical technology sectors, with a growing interest in energy related research.

The Trinity Long Room Hub (TLRH) is Trinity’s Arts and Humanities Research Institute. The TLRH facilitates and supports collaborative research in areas of inter-disciplinary scholarship across the Arts and Humanities and beyond, and houses a number of externally funded research projects, mainly in the Digital Humanities. It is committed to increasing the visibility, the relevance and the impact of Trinity’s research in the Arts and Humanities and serves as a prominent forum for public debates on society and culture and the challenges facing Ireland and the world.

The Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) leads brain research in Ireland and is the country’s only dedicated neuroscience research institute. TCIN is an interdisciplinary research institute with Principal Investigators from a wide range of disciplines including psychology, physiology, biochemistry, engineering, psychiatry and genetics.

TCIN PIs have produced over 450 scientific publications in the past 3 years in world-class peer-reviewed international journals. TCIN has over 80 registered Ph.D. students and educates 18 postgraduate students annually, who graduate with an M.Sc. in Neuroscience (the only one in Ireland). It hosts a popular public lecture series annually, and it has initiated and participated in major exhibitions in Trinity’s Science Gallery.

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Trinity Research & Innovation (TR&I) interfaces internally with Trinity College academics and administration units, and externally with industry, funding agencies and government bodies. TR&I provides supports and advice along the continuum from research funding application, through contract signature, through intellectual property management to exploitation by licensing to campus companies or established industry.

Trinity Research & Innovation comprises three offices:

The Research Development Office (RDO) supports Trinity researchers by providing information and advice on sources of research funding and calls for proposals. All research funding applications from Trinity are signed off by the RDO prior to submission to the funding agency.

The Contracts Office (CO) advises on, and negotiates, the terms of all research contracts awarded to Trinity and all collaboration and partnership agreements entered into by Trinity. The CO executes all research funding contracts on behalf of the university.

The Office of Corporate Partnership and Knowledge Exchange (OCPKE) encompasses the technology transfer and industry engagement functions of TR&I. The OCPKE manages intellectual property, supports campus company formation and builds external relationships to facilitate academic-industry research collaborations and to ensure transfer of technology and knowledge from Trinity to external entities for societal and economic impact.

Trinity Research & Innovation

Engaging with TR&I to deliver impactFrom Idea to Impact

Ireland’s leading

University

Research Funding Agency

Proposal

Partnering with

Industry

Project Plan Project

Running

IMPACT

World Class Research

Unique Infrastructure

International students

Track Record of Industry

Engagement

Idea Generation

Determine most suitable funding opportunity and

mechanism

Relationship building

Identify collaborators

Prepare/Submit proposal

Identify key business and research

challenges

Determine key scientific challenges

Map the problems on to the competencies of

Trinity researchers

Outline project implementation

plan

Identify key business issues

- IP, staffing, infrastructure

Identify deliverables

Finalise Contracts

Patents & IP Management

Invention Disclosure

Comms & Marketing support

Monitor deliverables

Licensing

Campus Company

Industry Interaction

Follow-on Projects

Communication of Impacts

Showcase Opportunity

and/or

New Service/Product

Societal Benefit

Business Sustainability /Growth


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Office of the Vice President and Dean of Research

House 1

Trinity College Dublin

Tel: 00353 1 896 1398

Email: [email protected]

www.tcd.ie/research

Office of Corporate Partnership & Knowledge Exchange

O’Reilly Institute


www.tcd.ie/innovation

Research Development Office

O’Reilly Institute


Email: [email protected]

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