With €72.6 million secured in funding, Trinity ranks first in Ireland for money received from the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.
Trinity, which has consistently dominated Horizon 2020 funding among Irish universities, is also ranked 33rd globally out of more than 1,500 institutions for funding received under programme. Trinity’s €72.6 million stake is well above that of the next highest recipient in Ireland, which sits at €47.2 million.
Speaking to The University Times in March, the Director General of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Prof Mark Ferguson, said that Ireland was on track to meet its overall goal of securing €1.25 billion over the lifetime of Horizon 2020. It’s “all going in the right direction”, he said.
In an email statement to The University Times, Doris Alexander, the Research Development Manager in Trinity, said: “With another 2.5 years to go in H2020, we do not underestimate the challenge to maintain such success and are constantly looking to see what would be the next ‘game changer’ in terms of supports that we can provide.”
“We are also already planning our strategy to see how to build supports and mine opportunities in the successor programme, Horizon Europe due to launch in 2021, the proposal for which will be officially published in June but around which intelligence is already circulating”, she added.
If private companies, public bodies and research organisations are included, Trinity ranks 46th out of over 17,000 organisations receiving Horizon 2020 funding, Alexander said.
private companies, public bodies and research organisations also draw down funding and in that regard our ranking financially is 46th out of over 17,000 organisations drawing down funding from over 170 countries globally.
Last month Glanbia Ireland, in collaboration with University College Dublin (UCD) and Trinity, was awarded €22 million through Horizon 2020.
One of Trinity’s more recent successes was by Prof Rhodri Cusack from the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. He was awarded €3 million from the European Research Council as part of the Advanced Grant scheme to carry out research to neurological changes during infancy.
He was one of only three individuals in Ireland successful in securing an Advanced ERC grant this year. This is the seventh such grant to be awarded to Trinity, representing half of the total 14 grants that have been awarded to Ireland.
Horizon 2020 is the eighth funding programme from the EU, with a budget of over €80 billion. Work is currently underway to devise the next funding programme, FP9, which will run from 2021 to 2027. Preliminary budgets for FP9 indicate it will have up to €100 billion to invest in ground breaking research globally. However, organisations such as the League of European Research Universities (LERU) are calling for an even greater increase to support research.
