Provost’s PhD Project Awards 2020-21

Posted on: 29 June 2021

The fourth round of the Provost’s PhD Awards were celebrated yesterday at a special reception in the Provost’s Garden. Congratulations to all of the winners, who have come through a competitive process to secure project funding.

The Provost PhD Awards were founded in 2017 to build research excellence in Trinity. The aim is to enable our academics at Assistant and Associate Professor level, to build capacity, expand their international networks and be better placed to secure competitive funding from national, EU and international agencies.

Each year since 2017, 40 PhD Awards have been funded from two main sources: alumni donations, and profits derived from the Commercial Revenue Unit, the CRU.

This year, 2020/21, exceptionally, funding was found for an additional 10 Awards, bringing this year’s number to 50, and the total to date to 170.

The applications are judged on a number of criteria, including notably the quality of the project and the extent to which the Award would represent a ‘game-changer’ for the Assistant or Associate Professor who receives it.

The benefits of the Awards are many:

• the PhD student recruited by the PI benefits hugely from the opportunity to undertake doctorate work with a research leader. As part of this programme, they have access to a variety of taught modules, both discipline specific and generic skills, to enhance and support their own research and career development. They gain essential experience in teaching, conference organisation, editorial assistance and workshop management.
• the Award helps galvanise the research trajectory of the Principal Investigators and demonstrates that they can obtain competitive research funding. We hope it gives them a boost to build their track-records in a way that makes them more competitive for external funding.
• The results of the research project itself adds to new knowledge in an important field.

Read the Provost’s speech here.

Last Friday it was announced that the Provost’s Council will create more Provosts’s PhD Project Awards with a €1.8 million fund in honour of the Provost.