Three Trinity researchers win prestigious European Research Council awards
Posted on: 10 December 2019
Three researchers from Trinity College Dublin have won prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant awards valued at €2 million each.
The winners are Dr Conor Buckley, Associate Professor and Director of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering and a Principal Investigator in the Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research (AMBER) Centre; Dr Redmond O’Connell, Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN); and Dr Matthew Campbell, Assistant Professor in the School of Genetics and Microbiology and a Principal Investigator in FutureNeuro, the SFI Research Centre for Chronic and Rare Neurological Diseases.
Trinity won three of the six grants awarded to researchers at Irish universities. The successes bring Trinity’s total number of ERC grants awarded under the EU Horizon 2020 and FP7 funding competitions to 45.
Dr Buckley will combine gene-based therapy and biomaterials to develop a new way to treat lower back pain. Dr O’Connell will pioneer a behavioural modelling framework to examine individual and group difference in decision-making. Dr Campbell will investigate the underlying cause of a very common form of blindness in the elderly called age-related macular degeneration (AMD) which affects up to one in four people over the age of 60 in Ireland.
ERC awards support investigator-driven, frontier research across all fields, and are awarded on the basis of scientific excellence. The Consolidator Grants support talented, mid-career researchers who have recently built independent, excellent teams and wish to strengthen them. These grants, which support five-year projects, are among the most sought-after and competitive in the world of research.
Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast, said:
European Research Council Consolidator Awards are highly competitive so it is a huge success for Trinity researchers to secure three. It is also very pleasing to see one award going to one of our researchers in each of the three ERC streams – social sciences and humanities, life sciences, and physical sciences and engineering – as this demonstrates the strength and depth of the work taking place in Trinity. These awards, which fund frontier research, will enable their recipients to plan their research careers and further grow their teams here in Ireland.
Dean of Research, Linda Doyle, said:
Matthew, Conor and Redmond are very deserving awardees and we are very proud of their success. They are driven by curiosity and will be implementing extremely creative approaches in their research projects, which have myriad potential impacts on their research fields and on society. Additionally, their success will enable them to nurture more research difference makers of the future as the funding will support a number of highly talented PhD and Postdoctoral researchers.
The Winning Projects
Dr Conor Buckley’s project, Personalised Medicine for Intervertebral Disc Regeneration – Integrating Profiling, Predictive Modelling and Gene Activated Biomaterials, proposes to combine gene-based therapy and biomaterials to develop a new method for personalised and tailored restoration of injured intervertebral discs. It envisions a future where the worldwide problem of lower back pain can be treated based on knowing the individual’s unique disc microenvironment.
This will be achieved through profiling of individual patient disc microenvironmental factors, with in vitro screening and in silico modelling to design cell therapies and predict regeneration outcomes. This will be combined with the development of tailored functionalised gene activated biomaterials.
Dr Buckley said:
I am absolutely delighted and honoured to have been awarded this prestigious grant from the European Research Council. It builds on the work my lab has been leading in the field of disc degeneration for the past few years, which has been funded through the Irish Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland Career Development Award.
The ERC provides an exciting opportunity to bring my labs research in injectable biomaterials and predictive modelling to a new level in developing new strategies for treating disc degeneration, offering new hope to patients suffering from back pain.
IndDecision: A neurally-informed behavioural modelling framework for examining individual and group difference in perceptual decision making is the title of Dr Redmond O’Connell’s project. In it he will examine how people make perceptual decisions and how that changes with age.
Dr O’Connell previously won an ERC Starting Grant in 2014 on decision making, the results of which led to this more advanced proposal intending to leverage a new framework to resolve ongoing debates in the field of neuroscience over contradicting models.
Dr O’Connell said:
This ERC Consolidator award represents a really exciting opportunity for several reasons. First, it is going to allow my team to pursue its goal of developing new and more precise ways of measuring the effects of natural aging on our decision-making abilities.
Research of this kind has the potential to help us to detect age-related brain pathologies at an earlier stage and thus provide greater opportunities for treatments to take effect. Secondly, a large portion of this funding will go towards training postgraduate and postdoctoral researches who represent the future of science in Ireland.
Dr Matthew Campbell’s project, Retina Rhythm: Investigating the role of the inner retina in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), will examine the key early signs of AMD and develop the next generation of therapies to treat this devastating form of blindness.
Dr Campbell and his team have recently discovered that the blood vessels of the inner retina are highly dynamic and their data suggest that they play a central role in AMD development. He believes, in contrast to studies to date, that the inner retina may be critical to the early stages of AMD onset.
Dr Campbell said:
I’m delighted and humbled to have been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant. It is a great testament to my research group who have worked tirelessly over the past 5 years to get us to this stage.”
Our project is focused on understanding the underlying cause of a very common form of blindness in the elderly termed Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). This condition is nearing epidemic levels in Ireland, with up to 1 in 4 people over the age of 60 showing signs of AMD. While there are treatments for some forms of the disease, there are limited options for most patients. This ERC grant will allow us to understand in great detail what the early initiating events are that lead to AMD.
Trinity is committed to supporting applications to the ERC and has, over the past four years, performed extremely well in that endeavour, winning 50% of the ERC grants awarded to researchers at institutions in Ireland.
There are significant supports available to researchers interested in pursuing this funding, including workshops and individual support from Trinity’s Research Development Office ERC Research Project Officers and the locally based Research Programme Officers and SFI Centre Teams. Researchers also have access to an Enterprise Ireland ERC proposal development fund of €16,000.
You can view videos of the three researchers describing their research projects HERE.
For more information about the ERC Consolidator Grants, see here: (https://erc.europa.eu/funding/consolidator-grants)