Two Trinity research staff, Dr Richard Hobbs and Dr John Goold, are among 44 researchers across the UK and Ireland to be appointed University Research Fellows for 2016 by the Royal Society.
The prestigious fellowships were awarded across 25 universities in the UK and Ireland, including three Irish institutions – Trinity, University College Dublin (UCD) and the University of Limerick (UL). The fellowships, which aim to support scientists early in their career, will be funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) in Ireland.
Hobbs is a Prinicpal Investigator in Trinity’s Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), which is the university’s largest research centre. Hobbs’s work involves research into how light energy might be funnelled to nanoscale sizes in materials where it might be used to drive a range of electronic or chemical processes.
The new Fellowship will support both Hobbs’s and Goold’s research for the next five years. In a press statement, Hobbs said: “By hosting the fellowship at Trinity, I will have access to the fantastic state-of-the-art nanofabrication and electron microscopy facilities available through CRANN and AMBER.”
AMBER, which is based in Trinity and is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and industry partners, encourages collaboration between scientists across Ireland into the development and research of materials.
“I am looking forward to collaborating with researchers at these centers and within the School of Chemistry to tackle big problems with nanomaterials”, Hobbs added.
Goold, who will begin working in Trinity as a University Research Fellow in 2017, is researching thermodynamics for quantum technologies. In a press statement, Goold said: “Thermodynamics is a theory with a remarkable range of applicability, successfully describing the properties of macroscopic systems ranging from refrigerators to black holes. With both the industrial and electronic revolutions behind us, we are currently pushing technology towards and beyond the microscopic scale to the border of where quantum mechanical effects prevail.”
He added that he hoped the new funding will allow him to “undertake a program of research which aims at addressing several key problems which are at the heart of this rapidly developing field”.
The new fellowships from the Royal Society have been awarded to researchers at some of the best universities in the UK and Ireland, including the University of Oxford, the University of Durham and the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1660, the Royal Society describes itself as a “Fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists”, and distributes nearly £42 million in grants to support modern science.
The other Irish recipients of the award were Dr Morgan Fraser, from UCD, for his work on “the fate of the most massive stars” and Dr Sinead O’Keeffe from UL for her work on “advancing photonics for radiotherapy”.
In a press statement, the Director General of SFI, Prof Mark Ferguson, said: “This prestigious programme highlights the high quality of Irish researchers at an early stage of their careers, it recognises those with the potential to become Ireland’s future research leaders.”
Correction: November 7th, 2016
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Dr John Goold had started in Trinity in October. In fact, he will start in 2017.
