Celebrating Innovative Research at Trinity
Posted on: 06 December 2019
Leading researchers and inventors at Trinity College Dublin were acknowledged for their innovative research and entrepreneurship at the Trinity Innovation Awards 2019 special awards ceremony.
The highest accolade, the Provost Innovation Award went to Trinity Alumni Sean Mitchell and David Moloney for their leadership in the highly competitive semiconductor industry.
Sean Mitchell
Having completed a degree and masters in Electronic Engineering at TCD in 1990, Sean went onto to join one of Ireland’s first and most successful semiconductor companies, Silicon and Software Systems (S3), which itself had been founded by TCD Professor Maurice Whelan in the mid-1980s. He left S3 to join another pioneering Irish tech company, Parthus, in 1994 where he was VP and General Manager Application Processor Division. He went on to take other leadership roles at CEVA, Silansys and Frontier Silicon before co-founding Movidius with Dave Moloney in 2005, taking up the role as CEO.
David Moloney
A graduate of Electronic Engineering at DCU, David has a wealth of experience in the fast-moving semiconductor industry, including nearly a decade overseas with Infineon in Munich and for SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (STM) in Milan. In 1994, David returned to Ireland where helped build the engineering team for the first product development at mobile computer chip firm Parthus.
Following the Parthus IPO David returned to do his PhD in Trinity College in the Mechanical Engineering Department in 2003 under Dermot Geraghty where his research inspired him to co-found Movidius together with Sean Mitchell in 2005.
Movidius was acquired by Intel in November 2016. Both Sean and David have taken up leadership roles at Intel since then where they continue to drive out innovation in semiconductor chip design.
About Movidius
Since its founding in 2005, Movidius has pioneered low-power embedded vision and neural network processing in edge devices. Movidius raised $100M of investment over the course of 10 years and when acquired by Intel Corporation in 2016, represented the largest M&A to date of an Irish technology company. Since then the team has expanded from 80 people to over 300.
At its AI Summit in November in San Francisco, Intel revealed its Movidius Myriad Vision Processing Unit (VPU), codenamed “Keem Bay,” for edge media, computer vision and inference applications. The company said the VPU, available the first half of 2020, incorporates “highly efficient architectural advances” and will deliver more than 10 times the inference performance of current Movidius VPUs and up to six times the power efficiency of competitor processors.
Congratulating them on the award, Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast said:
I am delighted to be presenting this award tonight to two of our leading engineering graduates Sean Mitchell and Dave Moloney. Both Sean and Dave have consistently demonstrated excellent entrepreneurial and leadership attributes throughout their careers in the globally competitive semiconductor business.
I congratulate them on not just winning tonight’s prestigious award but in their outstanding achievement in building a leading-edge technology company in Movidius which was acquired by one of our strategic industry partners, Intel, in 2016. I delighted to see that they have continued to shine at Intel, with the first major chip, the Movidius Myriad Vision Processing Unit (VPU), codenamed “Keem Bay,” being announced in San Francisco a few weeks ago.
Sean and David were joined by ten other Innovation Award winners at the special ceremony.
The Director of Trinity Research and Innovation, Leonard Hobbs said:
At this year’s event, we celebrate our colleagues whose innovative research has led to commercial success, along with our colleagues whose work has had a significant societal impact across a wide breadth of disciplines from nano science to neuro science, digital humanities to creative technologies and immunology to oncology.
We further recognise our colleagues who have demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit in founding high potential, investable companies which have achieved Campus Company status in 2019. We have added a new category this year for industry engagement.
The Lifetime Achievement award was presented to Professor Micheal Coey.
Professor Coey joined the Department of Pure and Applied Physics in Trinity College in 1978 and became a Trinity Fellow in 1982. In his principal area of research, solid state magnetism, he is a recognised world leader. With over 800 publications and 35,000 citations, his name is synonymous with the subject. A recipient of six international prizes, the most recent being the prestigious Max Born Medal and Prize awarded this year by the German Physical Society.
The practical applications of his research work were demonstrated most notably in the manufacture of digital storage. His pioneering approach to working collaboratively with industrial laboratories paved the way for the development of new magnetic memory/storage devices underpinning the current digital revolution. In 1994 he founded the campus company Magnetic Solutions Ltd which was acquired by Tokyo Electron in 2012.
Professor Coey has served Trinity as Departmental Head of Physics and as the Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, supervising over 50 Trinity PhDs. Since 2012 he has been Professor Emeritus in the School of Physics and continues his research in magnetism and magnetic materials.
Professor John Gilmer was awarded the Campus Company Founders award. John founded Trinity campus company Solvotrin Therapeutics and is currently the VP for research. He has played a key role in raising around €8M for Solvotrin over the past 8 years. Solvotrin have taken several licences from Trinity for intellectual property. Solvotrin has licensed a new invention from Johns lab for psoriasis treatment. He is currently Professor in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
The Inventors award is presented to those Academics whose innovative research has led to the creation of intellectual property and has subsequently licensed to Industry. The award this year was presented to both Professor John Donegan, recognising his many patents in laser systems and to Professor Tony Robinson for his extensive licensing of thermodynamic systems to multiple industry partners.
Dr David McCloskey and Dr Stephen Dooley were recognised with the ‘One to Watch’ award which is presented to up and coming entrepreneurial Academics whose research is most likely to result in the next Campus Company, commercial license deal or industry engagement. Both based in the School of Physics, Dr McCloskey’s work in energy systems has included innovative work in ceramic materials and 3D printing while Dr Dooley’s work on understanding the mechanism of chemical reactions occurring on fuel conversion devices has led to new learnings on how to improve their operation from an efficiency and green energy point of view.
Dr Joan Cahill and Professor Carmel O’ Sullivan were presented with Societal Impact Awards. Dr Cahill’s research is at the nexus of people, technology and process delivery; focusing on technology-based supports and intervention. Her many innovative contributions have spanned the aviation, car and assisted living sectors. Professor O’Sullivan specialises in Arts in Education, Asperger’s Syndrome, Autism Spectrum Disorder and Drama and Theatre in Education, amongst other things. In particular, she has led two linked projects focusing on enhancing socially disadvantaged young people’s careers.
This year a new award for Industry Engagement has been introduced which recognises an outstanding achievement by a Trinity researcher or research team in successfully building relationships and collaborating with industry with research programmes that have delivered significant value for the university, the enterprise partner(s) and the programme sponsors. This award in its inaugural year was presented to Dr Lorraine Byrne and Prof Mick Morris of the CRANN Institute for their joint leadership of the AMBER Institute which performs leading edge materials research with multiple industry partners.
Five spin out companies, who had attained Campus Company status in 2019, were recognised. These included:
2One Projects VERAFYE system for real time 3D ablation analysis in Atrial Fibrillation, increasing success rates for first cardiac ablation procedures, improving safety and reducing healthcare costs.
Azadyne: Novel therapeutic and targeted pathway for the treatment of autoimmune diseases, such as Multiple Sclerosis.
Exhaura: An Ophthalmology gene therapy company with an initial focus in glaucoma.
Nexalus: Products that take excessive heat from electronics, makes the thermal energy useful, thus increasing efficiencies and reducing costs. Numerous applications in gaming, high performance computing, data centres and automotive markets.
Head Diagnostics (iTremor): Simple to use iTremor device that enables quick diagnosis of Traumatic Brain Injury & Sports Concussion.
About Innovation at Trinity College Dublin
- Trinity ranks in the world’s top 1% of research institutions in 18 STEM fields, including immunology, materials science, and molecular biology and genetic.
- Trinity generates a fifth of all spin-out companies in Ireland from Irish higher education institutions.
- Trinity collaborates with eight of the World’s largest ICT companies in Ireland, and 11 of the World’s largest Pharma companies.
- Trinity technologies have been licensed in aviation, health technology, gaming and telecoms, new materials, medical devices and therapies.
- We also have a strong entrepreneurial spirit at TCD and for the fourth year running, Pitchbook has ranked Trinity College Dublin as the only European university in the top 50 worldwide for producing graduates who go to become successful entrepreneurs as measured by the level of VC-backed ventures.
- Trinity is placed 70th in the Reuters top 100 of Europe’s most innovative universities and is the only Irish university to rank in the top 100 in the 2019 report.