Seven awards for SFI-IRC pathway programme represent the richness of Trinity’s research

Posted on: 08 November 2023

Seven researchers across Trinity’s three faculties received funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) the Irish Research Council (IRC) under the pathway programme.

The awards enable postdoctoral researchers to conduct independent research for a four–year period and provide funding for a postgraduate student who will be primarily supervised by the awardee. A specific focus of the programme is to increase the representation of female researchers in the higher education system.

Trinity’s award-winning researchers are: Kiva Brennan and Claire Healy from the faculty of health sciences (HS), Nicola Palladino and Boris Kayachev from the faculty of arts, humanity and social sciences (AHSS), and Bharathi Konkena, Laetitia Chauve and Daniel Wigger, faculty of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

Welcoming the awards, Dean of Research at Trinity College Dublin, Professor Sinead Ryan said:

"I am delighted with this announcement of seven SFI-IRC pathway programme awards for Trinity researchers, and particularly so since these awardees represent the richness of research across our three faculties: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Engineering, Mathematics and Science; and Health Sciences. One of the principles of Trinity’s Research Charter is to ‘foster and grow research talent’ – by providing funding for a four-year period for postdoctoral researchers, these awards provide valuable support at a crucial point in their careers."

The Trinity funded projects under the SFI-IRC Pathway Programme are:

HS awards

Kiva Brennan, Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN)

Project title: Improving paediatric vaccines – closing the window of vulnerability

Summary: Worldwide, millions of children die every year from infectious diseases. While vaccinations have saved millions of lives, there remains a significant need to enhance childhood vaccine efficacy. Infants receive vaccinations against dangerous infections but achieve full protection only after several booster vaccinations, because their immune systems are not fully mature and do not function in the same way as an adult’s immune system. This leaves a “window of vulnerability” in a child’s life before booster vaccinations can take effect.

To maximise the effectiveness of vaccines, adjuvants can be added to boost the immune response. Most vaccines and adjuvants are developed and tested in adults; thus, effective adjuvants for the paediatric population are often overlooked. Kiva has identified an innovative adjuvant for paediatric vaccines using human neonatal blood. She aims to narrow the window of vulnerability to vaccine preventable disease in a child’s life by translating this adjuvant into pre-clinical models.

Claire Healy, Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine

Project title: Lipid and Iron Overloaded Lung Macrophages Fuel Opportunistic Non- Tuberculous Mycobacterial (NTM) Respiratory Infections

Summary: Non-tuberculous mycobacterial lung disease (NTM-LD) is now recognized as a chronic condition with considerable morbidity, mortality and inadequate treatment strategies. NTM-LD commonly occurs in those living with respiratory co-morbidities, resulting in decreased quality of life and increased mortality for these vulnerable individuals. The incidence of NTM infections is on the rise globally, including in Ireland. This increasing trend in NTM infections indicates a growing global disease burden which we do not have the effective tools and measures to manage. There is an urgent need to better understand how opportunistic NTM pathogens interact with the compromised host to develop improved targeted therapies for NTM-LD. The diseased lung microenvironment is vastly different to that of the healthy lung, yet how this altered nutrient landscape promotes infection remains to be fully elucidated. The aim of my proposed research is to examine the role of nutrient-dysregulated alveolar macrophages, the key intracellular niche for NTM during infection, in promoting NTM-LD. Using novel in vitro and in vivo approaches, we will dissect the host-pathogen interactions between NTM and the host in the context of chronic lung disease, allowing us to define pathways of NTM-mediated host immune injury that will unveil therapeutic targets for this often-untreatable disease.

STEM awards

Dr Daniel Wigger, Research Fellow, Physics

Project title: Quantum Acoustic Networks with Colour Centres in Atomically Thin Materials (QuANCAT)

Summary: The current second quantum revolution aims on generating and utilizing various quantum degrees of freedom in actual applications. The proposed project is located in the heart of this process as it will develop novel concepts to transmit and operate quantum information on a microchip platform. To reach this ambitious goal the planned approach will contribute establishing quantum phononics, utilizing quantum acoustic waves. Using phonons has the tantalizing advantage that phonons have in comparison to photons of the same frequency a much smaller wavelength and can thus be used and guided on much smaller length scales. The considered material platform is based on layered van der Waals materials which can be produced with single atom thickness, which further promotes the potential of ultimate atomistic miniaturization. In practice the phonons will be used to communicate between single qubit systems in the form of atomic defect centres in the material. These defect centres have the advantage that they offer single photon emission at room temperature. Thus, combining phonons and photons offers the possibility to create hybrid quantum chips that interface single light quanta, for long distance communication, with single sound quanta, for on-chip quantum communication, via qubits at ambient conditions.

Dr Laetitia Chauve, Research Fellow, Genetics

Project title: POLYCEL (POLYploid C.ELegans): Consequences of whole genome duplication on physiology and genome regulation in a synthetic C. elegans tetraploid.

Summary: Gene duplications play a major evolutionary role by providing raw material for functional innovation. Whole Genome Duplication (WGD), or polyploidization, is a particular case of duplication, where the entire genetic sequence is repeated within the nucleus. In plants, WGD is recognized as a major evolutionary force, linked to speciation and the ability to resist periods of stress. In animals, examples of current polyploid species are rarer, but several ancient WGD events are known: for instance, two rounds of WGD occurred during early vertebrate evolution. Those events are usually followed by gene loss and diploidization, processes which reshape the genome and channel evolutionary outcomes. The reason for the success of polyploidy in animals is unclear. One debated hypothesis states that polyploidy is adaptive on the short- term, however this has never been studied in animals. This question is highly relevant for cancer, as polyploidy is strongly correlated with drug resistance and poor prognosis. We are investigating the consequences of polyploidy in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, where tetraploidy can be artificially constructed. This project aims at understanding how animals adapt to polyploidy, and studying its potential adaptive consequences on the short term by combining genomics sequencing techniques, evolution experiments and genetic screening.

Dr Bharathi Konkena, Physics

Co-funder: SEAI

Project title: High Areal Capacity Lithium and Sodium Ion Battery Electrodes from Two- Dimensional Ternary Metal Phosphide Nanosheets (2DNs- BAT)

Summary: Discovery of new electrode materials with capable of achieving very high areal capacity is required for increasing the energy density of lithium/sodium(Li/Na)-ion batteries. The proposed research will focus to explore a new class of layered and non-layered materials based on Si/Ge/Sn based ternary metal phosphides. These materials possess attractive Li/Na ion storage capacity with theoretical capacities over 1600 mAh/g. Here, liquid phase exfoliation will be employed for size selective nanosheets and characterize with state of the art physico-chemical, electrochemical, microscopy and spectroscopy techniques. Subsequently, these nanosheets will be fabricated into solution-processed thin films for use as Li/Na storing electrodes. To achieve high areal capacities, Bharathi and team will combine these promising materials using an electrode architecture by combination of exfoliated nanosheets with carbon nanotube networks. Based on electrode thickness, they will demonstrate half/full cells of these electrodes to achieve near-state-of-the- art energy and power densities. The systematic investigations on precise monitoring of electrode optimization, conductivity and porosity as well as thickness dependent rate performance allow us to provide a critical assessment for the future developments in Li/Na-ion battery research. This will have a potential impact on scientific/technological field in both academic and industrial sectors to achieve “excellence and attractiveness in research and innovation.

AHSS awards

Dr Boris Kayachev, Department of Classics

Project title: Enjambement in Latin poetry: prosody, pragmatics and word order

Summary: Prosody (intonation, stress, rhythm) is a crucial tool that languages use to convey meanings; yet since prosody is not systematically encoded in writing, we have very little direct evidence about the prosody of a dead language like Latin. Enjambement in Latin poetry (the non-coincidence of a verse break with a syntactic boundary) is a largely neglected piece of evidence that can shed light on the prosodic organisation of Latin. In contrast to previous research that only considered, on limited material, the prosodic properties of specific lexical and syntactic categories, this project will also explore in depth how enjambement is used to express pragmatic meanings. It will systematically investigate enjambement across two corpora of Latin verse: (a) early comedy (Plautus and Terence); and (b) classical epic (Virgil’s Aeneid and Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica). The first corpus is arguably the closest approximation of actual spoken Latin we possess, the second consists of highly sophisticated artistic texts: the former can thus be used to make inferences about the prosody of ‘ordinary’ Latin, the latter may provide the key to understanding how the prosody, word order and pragmatics of poetic language differ from those of ‘ordinary’ Latin.

Dr Nicola Palladino, Human + Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub and Adapt

Project title: From Policy to Practices: Aligning Artificial Intelligence socio-technical design to European Union values and incoming regulation

Summary: The European Union is discussing a proposal for a ‘Regulation Laying Down Harmonised Rules On Artificial Intelligence‘, better known as ‘Artificial Intelligence Act’ (AIA), establishing regulatory requirements for AI systems. In so doing EU aims to position trustworthy and human-centric AI as the distinctive trademark for Europe and its industry as a leader in cutting- edge AI and set the global standard for the future use of AI. However, practitioners are still struggling to understand how to implement ethical and good governance principles in their operational routines. Although many technical tools have been developed in the last few years, they appear poorly integrated with broader accountability mechanisms. This project aims to fill this gap by linking regulatory and social requirements, technical tools and organizational practices into a comprehensive governance framework supported by a system of indicators, criteria, and operational plans. In the end, extensive stakeholder engagement and a use-centered approach will be employed to develop the “Guidebook on Artificial Intelligence Act Compliance” an instrument aimed at providing practitioners with concrete guidance on how to comply with the incoming EU regulation.

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