Sineád Baker | Co-Editor-at-Large
Professor Shane O’Mara, a Trinity Professor of Experimental Brain Research, is to receive €1.2 million of funding in order to study the systems that support memory in the brain.
Professor O’Mara becomes the first Irish-based recipient of a Senior Investigator Award. The award is a joint funding initiative between the Health Research Board, the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Partnership and Science Foundation Ireland. It aims to support top researchers that already hold a recognised academic position and research important questions in the areas of into health and disease.
He aims to greater understand brain systems by exploring the effects of brain damage on memory loss and how interactions within the brain support memory.
Professor O’Mara, who is a Principal Investigator in, and currently the Director of, the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, will be working in partnership with Professor John Aggleton of Cardiff University after they jointly received the Senior Investigator Award. They will receive the funding over a six-year period.
Speaking to The University Times, O’Mara explained how: “My research focuses on understanding the orchestration of the differing brain areas that are involved in consolidating memories in the brain. Simply put, here memories are the events of your life that you can recall and say out loud (‘declarative’ or ‘explicit’ memories).
“These can be simple – ‘what did I have for breakfast?’ or ‘where did I put my keys?’ or ‘where I am going out to tonight?’. We know some of the brain areas that support these kinds of memories, and knowing these will give us a chance to understand how they function in health, and how they might go wrong in diseases such as dementia.”
He continued: “I am delighted to have been selected for this Senior Investigator Award, but feel it is as much a testimony to many gifted PhD students and Postdoctoral Fellows I have been privileged to work with here at Trinity and further afield over the past years. I hope that through our work we will be able to reveal some of the principles underpinning memory processing by the brain, and as a result, be able to assist in some way toward the quest to help restore functioning to those some suffering from memory problems.”
Photo: Science Foundation Ireland
