Thursday, 1 February 2024

News Jim visited Shinichi Tanigawa and Bill Jackson at University of Tokyo for a week at the start of December to work on a joint research project. Yueyun gave an oral presentation in Berlin on "Using Quantitative Flow Ratio Curves for the Classification ofPhysiological Coronary Artery Disease Patterns" at the 16th International Conference of the ERCIM WG on Computational and Methodological Statistics Andrew delivered workshops on longitudinal data analysis and multiple imputation as part of a research visit to Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital Research Centre. Solomon and Anna took part in the research workshop as part of their PhDs collaborations.   Shane O'Connell (PhD student with Pilib, co-supervised by Dara Cannon in Medicine) successfully defended his thesis on: "Investigating the genetics of deep learning-derived neuroimaging phenotypes of neuropsychiatric disorders". Dr. Noor Kherreh has joined Pilib's group as a postdoctoral researcher. Devesh Haseja has joined Pilib's group as a research assistant. Micheál Ó Dálaigh (PhD student with Pilib) had his abstract accepted for an oral presentation at Glór na dTaighdeoirí, an interdisciplinary conference for postgraduate researchers with Irish, which will take place in March in UCD. Pierre Murchan (Pilib's group) presented on "Surrogate Biomarker Prediction from Whole-Slide Images for Assessing Overall Survival in Lung Adenocarcinoma" at the European Thoracic Oncology Platform (ETOP) meeting in Zurich. Pierre has also started his placement in the Cancer Molecular Diagnostics department at St. James's Hospital. Victoria (PhD student with Michael McG) submitted her thesis titled: “Boolean games played in a triangle using bi-partite and tri-partite entanglement”. Her viva will be on Friday 1st March 2024. Jim visited MIC Thurles for 4 days to work on some joint projects with Derek Kitson (MIC) and Sean Dewar (Bristol University). Jim gave a talk  (“A lower bound theorem for centrally symmetric simplicial spheres”) at the Santander Workshop on Geometric and Algebraic Combinatorics in Spain. Michael Mc Gettrick gave a talk on "Introduction to Quantum Games" at the Winter School on Quantum Quantum Computing Technologies (Mehran University, Pakistan), 17-18 January 2024 Did you know? The School has a vibrant community of contract research staff! Here's the current list (at least according to HR, please contact us for updates/corrections):   Works with Funded by Aghil Hooshmand Pilib HEA Chethana Padamnoor Rao Bharat SFI Devesh Haseja Pilib DTIF Dúalta Ó Fionnagáin Aaron SFI Harold Berjamin Stephan ERC Jemima O'Farrell Aaron SFI Kishor Das Johnny CURAM Michael Geever Aaron SFI Nastaran Sharifian Andrew DTIF Noor Khehvah Pilib DTIF Patricia Codyre Aaron SFI Patrick Staunton Cathal SFI Pratyush Kumar Bharat SFI Quan Zhang Stephan MSCA Sairam Pamulaparthi Venkata Michel MSCA Sandra Healy Cathal SFI Shaima Dsouza Bharat IRC Wanis Nafo Michel MSCA Yueyun Zhu Andrew SFI   Outputs Zhu, F., Wu, B., Destrade, M., Wang, H., Bao, R., & Chen, W. (2024). Voltage-controlled non-axisymmetric vibrations of soft electro-active tubes with strain-stiffening effect, International Journal of Solids and Structures, 290, 112671. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2024.112671 Venkata, S. P., Balbi, V., Destrade, M., & Zurlo, G. (2024). Designing necks and wrinkles in inflated auxetic membranes, International Journal of Mechanical Sciences, 268, 109031. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmecsci.2024.109031 Armario, X., Carron, J., Simpkin, A. J., Elhadi, M., Kennedy, C., Abdel-Wahab, M., ... & Mylotte, D. (2024). Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global TAVR activity: the COVID-TAVI study. JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcin.2023.10.041 Lunardi, M., Muhammad, F., Shahzad, A., Nadeem, A., Combe, L., Simpkin, A. J., ... & McEvoy, J. W. (2023). Performance of wearable watch-type home blood pressure measurement devices in a real-world clinical sample. Clinical Research in Cardiology, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00392-023-02353-7 Golovkine, S., Gunning, E., Simpkin, A. J., & Bargary, N. (2023). On the estimation of the number of components in multivariate functional principal component analysis. arXiv:2311.04540. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.04540 Das, K., de Paula Oliveira, T., & Newell, J. (2023). Comparison of markerless and marker-based motion capture systems using 95% functional limits of agreement in a linear mixed-effects modelling framework. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 22880. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49360-2 Zhang, Q., Hu, G., & Rudykh, S. (2024). Magnetoactive asymmetric mechanical metamaterial for tunable elastic cloaking. International Journal of Solids and Structures, 112648. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2024.112648

Thursday, 4 January 2024

Jim visited Shinichi Tanigawa and Bill Jackson at University of Tokyo for a week at the start of December to work on a joint research project. Jim had a letter on SFI and funding of basic research published in the Irish Times - https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2023/12/05/funding-basic-scientific-research/ Jim had an abstract accepted for the Santander workshop on Geometric and Algebraic Combinatorics https://gacsantander2024.unican.es/progam/ . On November 17th, 2023, Davood organised the 4th Young-ISA event at the University of Galway, bringing over 70 participants from different universities and institutes in Ireland and the UK. Davood would like to thank everyone who was involved in the smooth organisation and running of the event, including Mary, Collette, Kishor, Nastaran, Omid, Pouyan, and Parastoo.  Michel delivered a graduate course at Zhejiang University in China, and a series of talks at seminars (Hangzhou, Tianjin, Zhuji) and at an international conference in Ningbo.  Pilib was the UG representative at the launch of the newly-established Translational Medicine Alliance Ireland (TMAI). This alliance includes 10 Irish universities and aims to strengthen the partnership between scientists and clinicians, fostering impactful research that translates seamlessly from the laboratory to patient care through the development of new diagnostics, therapies, and medical interventions. Pilib was an expert evaluator for the European Commission for Horizon Europe call HORIZON-WIDERA 2023-ACCESS 02-01. Pilib was a reviewer for Bioinformatics 2024 which will be held in Rome, from Feb 21st-23rd. Sarah Ennis (PhD student with Eva Szegezdi, co-supervised by Pilib) successfuly defended her thesis entitled: "Single-cell characterisation of the bone marrow microenvironment and its contribution to acute myeloid leukemia". Shane O'Connell (PhD student with Pilib, co-supervised by Dara Cannon in Medicine) has submitted his thesis entitled: "Investigating the genetics of deep learning-derived neuroimaging phenotypes of neuropsychiatric disorders". Shane O'Connell (PhD student with Pilib, co-supervised by Dara Cannon in Medicine) gave a presentation at the Galway Neuroscience Centre annual Research day and won a prize for the best talk. Kevin Ryan (PhD student with Pilib, co-supervised by Laura Barkley in Medicine) gave a poster presentation at the EMBL Cancer Genomics conference in Heidelberg: "Identification of potential neoantigens in cancer-associated fibroblasts isolated from breast cancer patients" Shane, Kevin, Jacopo, Micheál, Karen, and Aghil (Pilib's group) all gave talks at the Irish Computational Biology and Genomics conference (ICBG2023) held in Galway on Dec 4-5th. Victoria (PhD student with Michael McG) was invited by the company Horizon Quantum to a hackathon from 27th November until 1st December in Bali, Indonesia. Her team won one of the two honorary prizes, worth $5000 (see picture of the team): Victoria was invited to give two online sessions at QJam2024 Making Quantum Games. The first talk is available at this link. Victoria was awarded a 2-month Junior Research Fellowship given by the Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematics and Physics (ESI) at the University of Vienna, Austria. Outputs Alibakhshi, A., Rahmanian, S., Destrade, M., & Zurlo, G. (2024). Local and global dynamics of a functionally graded dielectric elastomer plate. International Journal of Engineering Science, 195, 103987. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijengsci.2023.103987 Small, G., Berjamin, H., & Balbi, V. (2024). Poynting effect in fluid-saturated poroelastic soft materials in torsion. International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics, 159, 104601. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnonlinmec.2023.104601

Monday, 4 December 2023

Giuseppe was hosting Dr. Giulio Lucci, a post-doc student from Politecnico di Torino, to work with him on mathematical models of actin microtubules, from November 13th to November 23rd. Together with colleagues in the UK (Nottingham), Giuseppe has received funding from the Isaac Newton Institute, to organize a meeting focused on the mathematics of soft porous media and peatlands in particular. The meeting will take place in Scotland, in May 2024. Michel and Giuseppe's article “Local and Global Dynamics of a Functionally Graded Dielectric Elastomer Plate”, in collaboration with Amin Alibakhshi (Spain) and Sasan Rahmanian (Canada), was accepted for publication on the International Journal of Engineering Sciences. Giuseppe is attending the conference Continuum mechanics dialogues in Udine , 4-5 December 2023". Tatiana (PhD student with Stephan) attended the Training School on Acoustic & Elastic (Meta)-Materials in Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain, see group photo below. Michel hosted a three-day visit by Professor Alfredo Marzocchi, Department of Mathematics and Physics, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Brescia, Italy, who came to check on his PhD student Chiara Lenoti, currently visiting the school; Michel and Valentina hosted a week-long visit by Dr Tom Shearer, Department of Mathematics, Manchester University, UK, who came to complete a paper and discuss ideas for an SFI-EPSRC grant proposal; Michel visited his collaborators in UCD for two days, to make progress on a paper. Joshua submitted two extended abstracts to the FPSAC 2024 conference (Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics). One with Galen Dorpalen-Barry and Christian Stump titled "The Poincare-extended ab-index" and another with Claudia Alfes and Christopher Voll titled "Ehrhart polynomials, Hecke series, and affine buildings". Griffen (PhD student with Valentina), Harold and Valentina’s article “Poynting effect in fluid-saturated poroelastic soft materials in torsion” was accepted for publication in International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics. Outputs Abolfazl Mohajer (2023), “On Shimura curves generated by families of Galois G-covers of curves”, arXiv preprint, arXiv:2311.13829 Abolfazl Mohajer (2023), “Decomposition of Jacobian varieties and Shimura subvarieties in Ag”, arXiv preprint, arXiv:2311.15789

Friday, 3 November 2023

News Nina Snigireva will be an invited speaker at the 19th ILJU School of Mathematics Conference on Banach Spaces and Related Topics, to be held in POSTECH, Pohang, Korea in January 2024. Jim hosted a research visit from Prof Fernando Szechtman of University of Regina. Jim had a paper accepted in SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. Nastaran Sharifian joined Andrew's group as a postdoc on the HealIntel DTIF grant. John Andrew presented a poster at the Insight Scientific Plenary. Victoria (PhD with Michael McG) gave a talk at Des journées quantiques à AMU in Marseille (France). Victoria attended the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg, Germany. See photo with Adi Shamir and Whitfield Diffie. NOTE: the application for the next one opens from  9th November 2023 to 9th February 2024. It’s for undergrads, PhDs and post-docs. Parastoo Niloofar (PhD student with John Newell) delivered a poster presentation on "Survival Data Analysis and the Mean Residual Life Function" at the 8th Trials Methodology Symposium 20th of October 2023 Galway, Ireland. Michel collaborated with Afshin Anssari-Benam at the University of Portsmouth to apply for two grants in the UK: the International Exchanges scheme from the Royal Society of London, and the International Fellowship scheme from the Leverhulme Trust. Michel and Valentina are hosting visiting PhD student Chiara Lenoti from the University of Pavia Anna Grossbach is on a 2-months research placement at the Center for Genomic Medicine at Mass General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. She is visiting her PhD co-supervisor at Erin Dunn's lab and diving into her work on genetic influences on epigenetics during postnatal development. Davood has 1 application submitted as the co-PI in the recent HRB Secondary Data Analysis Projects funding call. Davood has 3 applications submitted as the main PI for this year’s IRC calls: 2 PHD, 1 Postdoctoral Fellowship. Davood has 2 applications submitted as the main PI in MedTrain+ MarieSkłodowksa- Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme at CÚRAM (one is invited for the interview). Davood is a reviewer for the Journal of Healthcare Technology Letters. Niall mentored two IRC applications, one postgraduate and postdoctoral, submitted earlier this month. Niall is spending the semester at Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland.  Pilib is attending a management committee meeting of COST action CA22103:A Comprehensive network against brain cancer, in Brussels on Mon 30th Oct. Pilib is a Co-PI on two Horizon Europe applications (HORIZON-HLTH-2024). Dr. Aghil Hooshmand (postdoc with Pilib) gave a talk: "Multi-omic integration of cancer liquid biopsy data: An All-Ireland approach at the All-Ireland Cancer Liquid Biopsies Consortium (CLuB) Symposium in Dublin on Oct 25th. Pilib co-chaired a session at this meeting. Kevin Ryan (PhD student with Pilib) has had his abstract accepted for a poster presentation at the EMBL Cancer Genomics virtual conference which will take place in November. Mark Onders, a study abroad student from the University of Notre Dame has started with Pilib's group as a research intern. Shane O'Connell (PhD student with Pilib) has had an article: "Predictive Modelling of Brain Disorders with Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Systematic Review of Modelling Practices, Transparency, and Interpretability in the use of Convolutional Neural Networks" accepted for publication in the journal Human Brain Mapping. Sarah Ennis (PhD student with Pilib, co-supervised with Eva Szegezdi in Biochemistry) has submitted her thesis entitled: 'Single-cell characterisation of the bone marrow microenvironment and its contribution to acute myeloid leukemia'. Jacopo Umberto Verga and Micheál Ó Dálaigh (PhD students co-supervised with Eva Szegezdi in Biochemistry) have joined Pilib's group. Jacopo Umberto Verga and Micheál Ó Dálaigh (PhD students with Pilib) attended the MeInBio Single Cell Symposium in Freiburg, Germany earlier this month. Jacopo gave an oral presentation: "Identification of potential therapeutic targets to revert natural killer cell exhaustion in Multiple Myeloma through single-cell RNA-Seq analysis". Micheál gave a talk: "HSC Interactome: An R Shiny App for Exploring Cell-Cell Interactions Between Hematopoietic Stem Cells and Other Bone Marrow Cell Types". Jacopo Umberto Verga and Micheál Ó Dálaigh (PhD students with Pilib) attended Haematology Association of Ireland annual meeting in Galway 2 weeks ago. Jacopo gave an oral presentation: "Identification of potential therapeutic targets to revert natural killer cell exhaustion in Multiple Myeloma through single-cell RNA-Seq analysis". Micheál had a poster presentation: "Comparative Assessment of Copy Number Variant Calling Tools for the Identification of Malignant Cells in an Acute Myeloid Leukaemia Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Dataset". Tips Becoming an expert evaluator for the European Commission is an important marker of esteem and international standing. It also gives an invaluable insight into what is expected of grant applications. The following video has more details. The Researcher Development Centre regularly organises events to help Postgraduates and Research Fellows progress in their career. Workshops include CV writing, Presentation Skills, Resilience, Assertiveness, etc. The university's MATLAB "campus wide licence" expires at the end of November. If you are using it, you'll have to make arrangements for your own licence. Contact Niall if you would like any more details. Outputs Laura Loftus, P Anne Scott, Niall Madden, Aoife Cooke, Nichola McNicholas. The Gender Pay Gap and Irish Higher Education: University of Galway, A Case Study. Administrative Sciences: Gender, Race and Diversity in Organizations. 2023 (to appear). S Ennis, PÓ Broin, E Szegezdi. CCPlotR: An R package for the visualisation of cell-cell interactions. Bioinformatics Advances (https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbad130) L Fahey, D Ali, G Donohoe, PÓ Broin, DW Morris. Genes positively regulated by Mef2c in cortical neurons are enriched for common genetic variation associated with IQ and educational attainment. Human Molecular Genetics (https://doi.org/10.1093/hmg/ddad142)

Monday, 2 October 2023

News Brian O'Sullivan (PhD with Cathal) has had a paper accepted for publication in Nucleic Acids Research Cancer  Cathal gave a presentation (in Irish) at Electric Picnic on research carried out together with Siobhán Cleary and Noor Kherreh The CRT, together with the African Society of Human Genetics, published a description of a joint training initiative in the journal Trends in Genetics (with Cathal and Sandra as co-authors) Noor Kherreh submitted her PhD thesis for examination; Declan and Siobhán have both submitted the final hardbound copies of their theses to the library (all with Cathal). Harrison Anthony (PhD with Cathal) has begun a three-month placement at The National Cancer Centre in Tokyo, Japan. Sophie Matthews (PhD with Cathal) has begun a three-month placement at Northern Arizona University, USA. Cathal and Patrick Staunton (postdoctoral fellow) are collaborators on Biotope2, an SDG Challenge 2021 programme project, which was runner-up for the SFI Future Innovator Prize. Total value: €700,000, of which approximately half goes to Malawi and  €100,000 will come to Galway. The award has now been officially announced. Simone Coughlan is now an Adjunct Lecturer in Bioinformatics. Jim published a preprint with Bryan Chen and Derek Kitson. “Block-and-hole graphs: Constructibility and (3,0)-sparsity” is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06804 Mark Ryder (PhD with Mark) attended the 18th Central European Quantum Information Processing Workshop in Smolenice, Slovakia. Omid Khazaei joined Andrew's group as a postdoc working on joint modelling of longitudinal and time-to-event data applied to the WEAN SAFE study.  Andrew gave a talk to the University Maths Society on "Making sense of sensor data".  John Andrew (PhD student with Andrew) delivered a poster presentation on "Longitudinal functional data analysis" at the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics conference in Milan, Italy. Andrew took part in a panel discussion on "Data for Health and Wellbeing" at the Semantic Picnic to celebrate the 20 years of DERI – Digital Enterprise Research Institute and the ten years of Insight – SFI Research Centre for Data Analysis. Harold will start employment as a postdoctoral researcher for Stephan’s ERC project in October. Sairam (PhD with Michel and Valentina) gave a talk about his work at the XVII International Conference on Computational Plasticity COMPLAS 2023 Conference, in Barcelona, Spain. Sairam (PhD with Michel and Valentina) took part in the 175th European Study Group with Industry Berlin, Germany. He is now on Secondment at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Spain. Michel applied for an EPSRC-SFI joint project with colleagues at the University of Glasgow. Angela's (joint) proposal for a two-week research programme on "Combinatorial Methods in Enumerative Algebra" at the ICTS Bangalore was successful. The programme will take place in December 2024. Josh, Tobias and Angela will give research-level courses there. Outputs Fezzi, S., Ding, D., Scarsini, R., Huang, J., Del Sole, P.A., Zhao, Q., Pesarini, G., Simpkin, A.J., Wijns, W., Ribichini, F. and Tu, S., 2023. Integrated Assessment of Computational Coronary Physiology From a Single Angiographic View in Patients Undergoing TAVI. Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions, p.e013185. Mac Curtain, B.M., Qian, W., Temperley, H.C., Simpkin, A.J. and Ng, Z.Q., 2023. Incisional hernias post cytoreductive surgery/peritonectomy and hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Hernia, pp.1-17. Beatty, R., Mendez, K.L., Schreiber, L.H., Tarpey, R., Whyte, W., Fan, Y., Robinson, S.T., O’Dwyer, J., Simpkin, A.J., Tannian, J. and Dockery, P., 2023. Soft robot–mediated autonomous adaptation to fibrotic capsule formation for improved drug delivery. Science Robotics, 8(81), p.eabq4821. O'Reilly, C., Gordon, S., Simpkin, A.J., Hembrecht, S., Móráin, M.Ó. and Barry, K., 2023. The effect of population density on outcomes of major trauma patients in Ireland. The Surgeon. H. Berjamin, M. Destrade, G. Saccomandi, Singular travelling waves in soft viscoelastic solids of rate type, European Journal of Mechanics - A/Solids (2023), 105144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euromechsol.2023.105144

Monday, 4 September 2023

News Quan (postdoctoral fellow with Stephan) attended the Phononics 2023 Conference at the University of Manchester, 11-16 June and gave a talk on "Hard-magnetic soft elastic metamaterials for tunable wave manipulation". Jim gave talks at the Fields Institute (Toronto) Workshop on Geometric Constraints: Materials, Graphs and Matroids, Rigidity and Packings, and at the Alberta Topology Seminar at the Biogeoscience Research Station in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada. He co-organised the latter meeting with Ryan Budney, University of Victoria.  Jim is an invited speaker at the annual Irish Mathematical Society conference in Limerick, 31 Aug - 01 Sep.  James Hayes (2023 Hamilton Prize Winner who just graduated from our Mathematical Sciences program, and incidentally, is a grandson of Michel's PhD advisor) will be giving a short talk at the Irish Mathematical Society conference in Limerick. The talk is based on joint work with David Cormican (who is starting a PhD with Tobias)  and Jim, arising from James and David’s final year project. Bharat and Michel published an article (see Outputs below) with Oisín Morrison (2021 Hamilton Prize Winner), based on his Final Year Project supervised by Bharat. Deirdre (PhD student with Aaron) presented her research talk entitled "Simultaneous optical & radio observations of the M dwarf flare star binary system EQ Peg" at the Irish National Astronomy Meeting conference in University College Cork, 24-25 August. Aisling, Mark (PhD students with Mark) and Victoria (PhD student with Michael McG) attended the conference Theory of Quantum Communication, Computing and Cryptography 2023 in Aveiro, Portugal. Victoria gave an online talk for the Early Career Mathematicians Seminar Series at IMA. Talk available here. Victoria was interviewed for the upcoming 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Heidelberg Germany. Interview available here.   HLFF Spotlight: 10th HLF The Physicist Embracing Opportunities – Victoria Sánchez Muñoz Interested in community outreach projects? Then make sure to brainstorm a few ideas at the 10th HLF with upcoming attendee Victoria Sánchez Muñoz over a round of tic-tac-toe. Community engagement is one of the (many) aspects about her PhD studies on quantum games at the University of Galway (UoGalway) in Ireland that the 29-year-old Spanish physicist enjoys the most. Read more scilogs.spektrum.de   Victoria received funding to attend the upcoming conference Talking Maths in Public 2023 in Newcastle, UK. Ted has been invited to give a talk on  ``Linear block and convolutional MDS codes to required rate, distance and type'' at ``The 5th International Conference on Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems'', November 17-20, Macao, China (Online and in-person). Ted is External Examiner for Masters, Higher Diploma and Diploma programmes on Data Science/Data Analytics at DkIT (Dundalk Institute of Technology). Ted gave a talk on "Groups and group rings are best for Coding Theory" at the ISCHIA Group Theory Conference, May 2022.   Ted was invited to give a talk on "Idempotents"  at the "CCGTA, Combinatorics, Computing, Group Theory and Applications" conference in South Florida. He was also one of the organisers and wrote parts of the application and reports; the conference was sponsored by NSF (National Science Foundation of USA).  Ted was one of the keynote speakers at GCGN2023, Graph Spectra, Combinatorial Graph Theory, Group Theory and Nano-Molecular-Electronic-Devices; Malta 27-30 March. His talk was on "Building matrices and unique reconstruction'' and is available online. Ted regularly reviews for Mathematical Reviews. Here's his message: "This important publication for the mathematical community urgently requires more reviewers. A  `review' essentially summarises and states what is new in the article. Reviewers have a different function to referees. MathSciNet is the electronic version of Mathematical Reviews and is a great resource for us all. MSC (Mathematical Subject Classification), which we all use, was developed by Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt Math." The CRT in Genomics organised a Careers Day event for its students at RCSI on 25th Aug, with participation by most of the Galway-based CRT students. It included keynote speakers, breakout sessions on careers in various sectors (startups, academia, health research and clinical settings, Industry, Public sector, NGOs) and careers outside Genomics Data Science), and the opportunity for networking! Cathal is hosting a research visit from Marvin Döbel, a research scientist at the university hospital in Tübingen.  Cathal and Patrick Staunton (postdoctoral fellow) are collaborators on Biotope2, an SDG Challenge 2021 programme project, which was runner-up for the SFI Future Innovator Prize. Total value: €700,000, of which approximately half goes to Malawi and  €100,000 will come to Galway. Andrew delivered a keynote talk on "Modelling epigenetic change across the lifecourse " at the UKEMS conference in Dublin in July, The SFI-Cisco Clare Island HomeHealth project that Andrew is a co-investigator on held a successful outreach day in late June.https://www.rte.ie/news/connacht/2023/0628/1391577-clare-island/ Jair Andrade has joined Andrew's group as a postdoc working on the Home Health project. Niall is currently attending a workshop "New Directions in Applied Linear Algebra" at the Banff International Research Station, Canada. He is giving a talk on preconditioning for singularly perturbed PDEs. Harold gave a talk at the 10th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics ICIAM conference in Tokyo, Japan. Michel gave an invited talk at a workshop on "Mathematical mechanical biology" held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK. The talk is available here. Angela is giving a talk at the conference "Counting Problems in Groups" at the University of Lincoln, UK, and another at the Combinatorial section of the Congress of the Italian Mathematical Union, Pisa, Italy. Pilib visited collaborators at the Einstein College of Medicine and at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, USA. Kevin, Sarah, Shane, and Karen (Pilib's group) all presented posters at the ISMB/ECCB 2024 conference in Lyon, France, 22-28 July. Dr Seyed Aghil Hooshmand (Aghil) has joined Pilib's group to work on the HEA-funded North-South Research project on cancer liquid biopsies. Jingyan Wang (Jane) has started a PhD in Pilib's group. Jane is co-supervised with Cynthia Coleman in Medicine and is funded by a Chinese Scholarship Council Research Scholarship. Rachel's paper "Interchangeable Origami Wallpaper Patterns" appeared in the Proceedings of this year's Bridges Conference on Mathematics and Art. She gave a talk at the conference, with the same title, and exhibited a piece of art, see below. Rachel is a guest editor for a special issue of Linear Algebra and its Applications dedicated to the proceedings of the ILAS Conference held in Galway in June 2022, and a special issue of PRIMUS on teaching and learning in linear algebra. Three postdoctoral fellows have recently joined Bharat's team: Dr Chethana Rao, Dr Pratyush Kumar, and Dr Shaima D'Souza. Here is their bio: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/tripathilab/team/          Outputs   Quan Zhang, Andrei V. Cherkasov, Chen Xie, Nitesh Arora, Stephan Rudykh, Nonlinear Elastic Vector Solitons in Hard-Magnetic Soft Mechanical Metamaterials, International Journal of Solids and Structures 280, 112396 (2023).  Lina Yang, Quan Zhang, Gengkai Hu, Nuo Yang, Deformation Insensitive Thermal Conductance of the Designed Si Metamaterial, Applied Physics Letters 123, 062201 (2023). Cruickshank, J., Kastis, E., Kitson, D., Schulze, B. Braced Triangulations and Rigidity. Discrete Comput Geom (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-023-00546-5 Ted Hurley ``Linear block and convolutional MDS codes to required rate, distance and type''Intelligent Computing. SAI 2022, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 507. Springer, pp 129-157 (2023). Nicola Fitz-Simon, John Ferguson, Alberto Alvarez-Iglesias, Mircea T. Sofonea and Tsukushi Kamiya,Understanding the role of mask-wearing during COVID-19 on the island of IrelandRoyal Society Open Science, 10 (7), 2023. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221540 Mallart, C., Simpkin, A.J., Venant, R., Ballier, N., Stearns, B., Li, J.Y. and Gaillat, T., 2023, July. Exploring a New Grammatico-functional Type of Measure as Part of a Language Learning Expert System. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023) (pp. 466-476). Hernon, O., McSharry, E., Simpkin, A.J., MacLaren, I. and Carr, P.J., 2023. Effectiveness of structured self-evaluation of video recorded performance on peripheral intravenous catheter insertion: a randomised control trial study protocol. Trials, 24(1), pp.1-8.    Lussier, A.A., Zhu, Y., Smith, B.J., Simpkin, A.J., Smith, A.D., Suderman, M.J., Walton, E., Relton, C.L., Ressler, K.J. and Dunn, E.C., 2023. Sensitive periods for the effect of childhood adversity on DNA methylation: Updated results from a prospective, longitudinal study. Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, 3(3), pp.567-571. Nafo W, Guldeniz O, Jun H, Kim E (2023) Ligamentous Tethering and Intradiscal Pressure Affecting the Mechanical Environment of Scoliotic Spines. Med Eng Phys 104035. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.medengphy.2023.104035   Ligamentous tethering and intradiscal pressure affecting the mechanical environment of scoliotic spines Despite several theories have been proposed to explain the progression of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS), there is no consensus on the mechanic… doi.org   Nafo W (2023) Polymer-based nanosystems and their applications in bone anticancer therapy. Front Chem 11:1218511. https://doi.org/10.3389/fchem.2023.1218511   Polymer-based nanosystems and their applications in bone anticancer therapy The mortality rate of bone cancer has witnessed a substantial reduction in recent years, all thanks to the advent of advanced cancer treatment modalities such as surgical intervention, radiation, and chemotherapy. Nevertheless, these popular modalities come with a set of clinical challenges, including non-specificity, side effects, and drug intolerance. In recent years, polymer-based nanosystems have emerged as a promising solution in bone anti-cancer therapy by virtue of their unique physical and chemical properties. These nanosystems can be tailored for use in different drug release mechanisms for therapeutic implementations. This review delves into the efficacy of these therapy applications in bone cancer (with a focus on one of the most common types of cancers, Osteosarcoma) treatment and their correlation with the properties of polymer-based nanosystems, in addition to their interaction with the tumor microenvironment and the biological milieu. doi.org   Oisín Morrison, Michel Destrade, Bharat B. Tripathi, An atlas of the heterogeneous viscoelastic brain with local power-law attenuation synthesised using Prony-series. Acta Biomaterialia (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actbio.2023.07.040 S.P. Venkata, V. Balbi, M. Destrade, D. Accoto, G. Zurlo. Programmable wrinkling for functionally-graded auxetic circular membranes. Extreme Mechanics Letters. 63 (2023) 102045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eml.2023.102045   Programmable wrinkling for functionally-graded auxetic circular membranes Materials with negative Poisson’s ratio, also known as auxetic materials, display exotic properties such as expansion in all directions under uni-axia… doi.org

Wednesday, 1 March 2023

News: Quan Zhang's application (host supervisor: Stephan) for a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship has been approved for funding at a value of €199,694.40 costs over a period of 24 months. This was Quan's second attempt, showing that applications can be recycled and given a second chance! Ted is to be one of the keynote speakers at GCGN2023, Graph Spectra, Combinatorial Graph Theory, Group Theory and Nano-Molecular-Electronic-Devices; Malta 27-30 March 2023. Title: ``Building matrices and unique reconstruction''. The talk will be available online. Stephan and Michel applied to the Hardiman Scholarship Scheme. It seems there will be 18 grants in total this year.  Angela applied to the Millenium Fund scheme. Götz and Michel applied to the UoG-China Scholarship Council Scholarship scheme for PhDs. Götz is delivering an advanced mini-course on "Computational aspects of complex reflection groups" at the Spring School on "Real, Complex, and Symplectic Reflection Groups", 6 - 10 March 2023, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Wanis Nafo is joining us as a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (host supervisor: Michel) for a period of 24 months. His project is entitled "LCT-Localised Cancer Therapy". Sairam and Michel wrote an RTE Brainstorm article on "Metamaterials". Sairam is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie PhD Fellow co-supervised by Valentina and Michel. Cathal was awarded €69,000 from the CRT data generation fund as part of a collaborative project with Niamh Hynes on the genomics of aortic pathologies.  Cathal was appointed to the steering board of Genomics Data Infrastructure Ireland Cathal was appointed to the board of a national research ethics committee for the  National Covid Biobank   Papers: Ted Hurley, Barry Hurley ``Non-separable matrix builders for signal processing, quantum information and MIMO applications'', 2023, ArXiv Charamba, B., Liew, A., Nadeem, A., Newell, J., O’Keeffe, D.T., O’Brien, T., Wijns, W., Shahzad, A. and Simpkin, A.J., 2023. Statistical techniques used in analysing simultaneous continuous glucose monitoring and ambulatory electrocardiography in patients with diabetes: A systematic review. Plos one, 18(2), p.e0269968. Funding: The college has issued the call from the Research Seed / Project Fund, which aims to support staff to pursue research and innovation activities that have the potential to lead to applications for external funding for large-scale PI or consortia grants. It is open to all permanent members of academic staff at all career stages, and to contract researchers, including post-doctoral researchers, who have a contract with the University for the period of the proposed activity. Funding of up to €15,000 for up to 12 months duration. The deadline is Friday March 31st 2023 at 12 noon.  

Thursday, 5 January 2023

Funding: Andrew is co-PI on a €4.6m Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund (DTIF) project, together with Feeltect, Armour Interactive and Odyssey Validation Consultants. This project will develop data-driven improvements to products and protocols associated with measuring and monitoring compression therapy and wound care. The University will receive approximately €1.25m to deliver the statistical and clinical aspects of the project. Pilib is a collaborator on an SFI Frontiers for the Future Programme project led by Derek Morris (Biochemistry) and Dara Canon (Anatomy). This project was awarded €478k in direct costs over a period of 48 months.   Pilib became a funded investigator at the SFI ADAPT Centre, receiving €68k to support the recruitment of a PhD student to work on graph-based machine learning for biomedical data.   Bharat's application under the National Challenge Fund – Future Digital Challenge call has been approved for funding by SFI at a value of €198,859.60 direct costs over a period of 18 months with €45,550 in overheads to the university. This project will support two postdoctoral positions. Here is the advertisement, please circulate it as widely as possible.     News: Niall's list of international collaborators of the school keeps growing, please send more info about your links to foreign institutions. According to SciVal, we're the school of maths with the most international collaborations in Ireland!   Jim was an external examiner for a PhD viva at Lancaster University, UK.   Andrew worked with local students from Coláiste Iognáid on their BT Young Scientist of the Year project to see if a deposit return scheme (DRS) for plastic bottles and aluminium cans could be monetised in a school setting (using chocolate instead of cash!). Giuseppe is spending two weeks in Israel at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, to collaborate with Reuven Segev on the connections between differential geometry and biological growth. He is also giving invited talks at the Department of Mechanical Engineering,  Ben-Gurion University, and at the Racah Institute of Physics, University of Jerusalem. Last month, Giuseppe gave an invited talk at the Department of Mathematics, Mechanics and Management, Politecnico di Bari, Italy, on "The origin of residual stress in additive manufacturing". Pilib was an external examiner in December for the viva of Dr. Alexandre Pelletier, a PhD candidate at the European Genomic Institute for Diabetes, Institut Pasteur de Lille, France.   Pilib participated in the SFI 'Spéirscéalta' (Stories of the Air) project which links researchers with writers to produce scientifically-informed short stories.   Three members of Pilib's group presented posters at the Irish Computational Biology and Genomics Symposium, which took place in the Aula Maxima here on campus on 1-2 December 2022. Karen Guerrero Vázquez and Kevin Ryan were also on the organising committee for this Symposium (photo).       Anna Großbach and several other CRT in Genomics Data Science PhD students from the School (sorry I don't have all the names, see photo for all the cohorts) also attended the Irish Computational Biology and Genomics Symposium. Lydia King (and others) presented a poster. Anna gave a talk about a scoping review and simulation studies on "Modelling Epigenetic Age over Time" in the 'reproducibility in bioinformatics' session. Karen Guerrero Vázquez and Kevin Ryan from Pilib's group took part in the VitaDAO Hackathon (https://longhack.org/). Both were on winning teams, with Karen’s team AdStella coming in 2nd Place and Kevin’s team AGen-iNET coming in 3rd place. Their projects involved a machine learning model to predict the muscle state given future conditions and an end-to-end pipeline for RNA-seq and network analysis. The SIAM Student Chapter at the University of Galway organised the 9th Annual Irish SIAM Student Chapter Conference on 9th December 2022. More than 40 people registered and there were over 35 attendees. The conference had 2 keynote speakers, 7 contributed talks, and 5 poster presentations. /media/collegeofscience/schools/schoolofmathematics/images/SIAM.png Victoria (PhD student with Michael McG) won the 2022 Graham Hoare Prize last month. Her article now published in Mathematics Today and is available here.    Papers:   McNicholas, B.A., Rezoagli, E., Simpkin, A.J., Khanna, S., Suen, J.Y., Yeung, P., Brodie, D., Li Bassi, G., Pham, T., Bellani, G. and Fraser, J.F., 2023. Epidemiology and outcomes of early-onset AKI in COVID-19-related ARDS in comparison with non-COVID-19-related ARDS: insights from two prospective global cohort studies. Critical Care, 27(1), pp.1-14.   Talkar, T., Low, D.M., Simpkin, A.J., Ghosh, S., O’Keeffe, D.T. and Quatieri, T.F., 2023. Dissociating COVID-19 from other respiratory infections based on acoustic, motor coordination, and phonemic patterns. Scientific Reports, 13(1), p.1567.   de Freitas, S.M., Hinde, J.P., Demétrio, C.G.B. and Fallah, Lida (2022) Overdispersion models for clustered toxicological data in a bioassay of entomopathogenic fungus. Brazilian Journal of Biometrics, 40, 490–509, doi:10.28951/bjb.v40i4.647   Morrissey E, Murphy A, Murphy P, Newell J,  et al. Supporting GPs and people with hypertension to maximise medication use to control blood pressure: Protocol for a pilot cluster RCT of the MIAMI intervention [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. HRB Open Res 2023, 6:6.   Davey, M; McGuire, A; Casey, MC; Waldron, RM; Paganga, M; Holian, E; Newell, J; et al. Evaluating the Role of Circulating MicroRNAs in Predicting Long-Term Survival Outcomes in Breast Cancer: A Prospective, Multicenter Clinical Trial. Journal of the American College of Surgeons 236(2):p 317-327, February 2023.   McCabe, G. P., & Newell, J. (2022). The art of translational statistics.Stat,11(1), e519. https://doi.org/10.1002/sta4.5198of8MCCABEANDNEWELL   Kirwan, C., Hynes, L., Hart, N., Newell .J, Roshan, D. et al. The multimorbidity collaborative medication review and decision making (MyComrade) study: a pilot cluster randomised trial in two healthcare systems. Pilot Feasibility Stud 8, 225 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40814-022-01107-y   Moloney, S., Fitzgerald, D., Roshan, D. and Gethin, G., 2022. Impact of hidradenitis suppurativa-specific wound dressing system on patient quality of life and dressing-related pain: pilot study. Journal of Wound Care, 31(11), pp.898-906.   Krieger, N., Chen, J., Testa, C., Roux, A.V.D., Tilling, K.M., Watkins, S.H., Simpkin, A.J., Suderman, M.J., Smith, G.D., De Vivo, I. and Waterman, P., 2022. Use of incorrect and correct methods to account for age in studies on epigenetic accelerated aging: implications and recommendations for best practices. American Journal of Epidemiology.   Digby, B., Finn, S.P. & Ó Broin, P. nf-core/circrna: a portable workflow for the quantification, miRNA target prediction and differential expression analysis of circular RNAs. BMC Bioinformatics 24, 27 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-022-05125-8   Q Zhang, AV Cherkasov, N Arora, G Hu, S Rudykh. Magnetic field-induced asymmetric mechanical metamaterials. Extreme Mechanics Letters 59, 101957 (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352431623000032   V. Chen, N. Arora, A. Goshkoderia,  C. Willey, Z. Turgut, P. Buskohl, S. Rudykh, A. Juhl, Mechanical instability tuning of a magnetorheological elastomer composite laminate. Composites B 251, 110472 (2023) link   S Harmansa, A Erlich, C Eloy, G Zurlo and Thomas Lecuit. Growth anisotropy of the extracellular matrix shapes a developing organ, Nature Communications (to appear).     Posters:   Characterisation of patient-derived cancer-associated fibroblast subpopulations and prediction of neoantigens within the breast tumour microenvironment. K. Ryan, D. O’Connor, L. Barkley, P. Ó Broin   Strategies for the selection of miRNA candidates for the treatment of Sarcopenia using network-based analysis and differential expression scoring. Karen Guerrero Vazquez, Pilib Ó Broin, Katarzyna Whysall   Single-cell characterisation of the hematopoietic bone marrow interactome in health and disease Sarah Ennis, Alessandra Conforte, Eimear O'Reilly, Tatiana Cichocka, Sukhraj Pal Dhami, Philippe Krebs, Pamela Nicholson, Pilib Ó Broin, Eva Szegezdi Sarah's poster also received an honourable mention.  

Friday, 2 December 2022

Bharat submitted an application for a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Doctoral Network, as a collaborator; Niall supported an application to the IRC postgraduate scholarship programme and another to the IRC postdoctoral fellowship programme. Davood co-organized the 3rd Young Statisticians’ Section of the Irish Statistical Association annual meeting at the University of Limerick on 7th October 2022. The meeting aimed to bring together many career-young statisticians in Ireland to focus on collaborative workflow in Statistics and Data Science. Kishor Das gave a talk entitled "Statistical Approaches for Method Comparison Studies involving Functional Responses with Applications in Elite Sports"./media/collegeofscience/schools/schoolofmathematics/images/Research-Update-November-2022.jpg Davood also co-organised the 3rd Young-ISA Twitter Poster Conference 5-6th of October 2022.  The event is held entirely on Twitter and aims to provide an opportunity for Statisticians and Data Scientists around the world to meet online, share their research and engage in scientific discussion. Jim was a co-author of a conference presentation: “Graph rigidity and identifiability of tensor completions”, S Tanigawa, J Cruickshank, F Mohammadi, A Nixon, K Nakagawa at the workshop “Tensors in statistics, optimization and machine learning” at the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. John attended the 66th Reunião Anual da RBras,  Floripa, Brazil, where he represented the International Biometric Society at the Opening Session; presented the Keynote Opening RBras President’s Invited talk - A Brazilian Biometric Journey; and organised a session on Count Data – New Developments, with a talk on "Modelling excess zeros in count data". Victoria (PhD student with Michael McG) won the 2022 Graham Hoare Prize, awarded annually to Early Career Mathematicians by the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA, UK) for "a brilliant Mathematics Today article". The article will be published in the December issue of Mathematics Today. She received the certificate in a presidential address ceremony in London on November 23. Anna (Marie Curie PhD student) and Andrew attended the "Epigenomics of Common Diseases" conference on the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge, UK. She presented their poster on "Modelling Epigenetic Age Over Time",  introducing their scoping review and simulation study results on how to model longitudinal epigenetic age. The SFI Centre for Research Training in Genomics Data Science held a week-long series of webinars and workshops on African Genomics in collaboration with the African Society of Human Genetics and this week, the CRT is holding its annual research symposium. Bin applied successfully for a faculty position at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, under the New One Hundred Talents Program. He will be leaving us in the autumn. Congrats, Bin! Research co-authored by Michel (and Joyce!) was featured on the front page of The Irish Times last week, see the online version here.   Outputs: Cruickshank, J., Jackson, B. & Tanigawa, Si. Vertex Splitting, Coincident Realisations, and Global Rigidity of Braced Triangulations. Disc. Comp. Geom. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-022-00459-9 Andrini, D., Balbi, V., Bevilacqua, G., Lucci, G., Pozzi, G., & Riccobelli, D. (2022). Mathematical modelling of axonal cortex contractility. Brain Multiphysics, 100060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brain.2022.100060  S. Mukherjee, M. Destrade, A.L. Gower. Representing the stress and strain energy of elastic solids with initial stress and transverse texture anisotropy. Proceedings of the Royal Society A. 478 (2022) 20220255. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2022.0255 Y. Chen, B. Wu, M. Destrade, W. Chen. Voltage-controlled topological interface states for bending waves in soft dielectric phononic crystal plates. International Journal of Solids and Structures. 259 (2022) 112013. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2022.112013    

Friday, 4 November 2022

Niall's map of all our research connections around the world is taking shape! Here's where we are at the moment Grant applications: Giuseppe, Bharat, Davood each submitted IRC Postgraduate Scholarships this year. Mark, Michel (two applicants), Bharat each submitted IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship applications. Pilib is a co-applicant (with Cynthia Coleman, Medicine) on an SFI Frontiers for the Future Project. Bharat submitted a grant proposal to SFI-National Challenge Funding in the subcategory Future Digital Challenge. News: Mark Ryder (PhD student with Mark) has been selected to attend the Gemini Autumn School on Quantum Computation in Oslo; Eamon McAndrew joined Pilib's group as a Research Assistant on a three-month contract supported by the College of Science and Engineering Strategic Research (Millennium) Fund.  Pilib joined the Programme Committee for the 30th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS2022) which will be held from December 8th-9th at Munster Technological University. Pilib is advertising three postdoctoral positions in his group in cancer genomics/bioinformatics. These positions are funded through DTIF and HEA North-South Shared Research Programme awards. Sarah Ennis (PhD student with Pilib) has started a 3-month placement at Simon Haas's group at MDC Berlin (BIMSB).  Sarah gave a poster presentation at the Single Cell Genomics 2022 Meeting, held from October 17th-19th in Utrecht.  Pierre Murchan (PhD student with Pilib) gave a poster presentation at the Trinity St. James's Cancer Institute International Conference held from 13th-14th October in Dublin and also at the European Thoracic Oncology Platform Residential Workshop in Amsterdam held Nov 3rd-4th. Karen Guerrero Vazquez (PhD student with Pilib) gave a poster presentation at the Mathematics of life: modelling molecular mechanisms course 2022 held (online) by the European Molecular Biology Lab-European Bioinformatics Institute on September 15th. Shane O'Connell (PhD student with Pilib) gave a poster presentation at the Genetics and Genomics Sciences retreat in the New York Academy of Science on Oct 7th. Bharat gave a talk entitled "Shear Shock Waves in Concussions" to a cohort of 40-50 primary, and secondary school teachers on 01/10/2022 at the Teachers in Residence programme organised by CÚRAM. Jim gave a talk at the online seminar series “Selected Topics in Mathematics”. The talk is available from the seminar homepage [http://Jim gave a talk at the online seminar series “Selected Topics in Mathematics”. The talk is available from the seminar homepage https://stream.liv.ac.uk/fnaf8up5 He is also a co-organiser of the series so if you are interested in giving a talk there, contact him.]https://stream.liv.ac.uk/fnaf8up5  He is also a co-organiser of the series so if you are interested in giving a talk there, contact him. Michel gave a talk at the Mechanics Seminar, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China (online), a plenary lecture at the Fifth International Conference on Recent Advances in Nonlinear Mechanics, Hangzhou, China (online), and a talk at the Séminaire de Mécanique, Université de Bordeaux, France (in-person). Michel was External Examiner for a PhD thesis and viva (online) at IIT Roorkee, Roorkee, India. Sairam (PhD student with Michel and Valentina) went to a networking event organised by his Marie Skłodowska Curie Doctoral Network in Madrid, Spain. Michael McG gave an invited keynote talk on "What is a Quantum Game" at the 12th "Days on Computational Game Theory", University of Bremen (Germany), September 29-30 2022.   Outputs: JSY Sui, P Martin, A Keogh, P Murchan, L Ryan, S Nicholson, S Cuffe, P Ó Broin, SP Finn, GJ Fitzmaurice, R Ryan, V Young, SG Gray.  Altered expression of ACOX2 in non-small cell lung cancer.BMC Pulmonary Medicine 22 (1), 1-21, 2022 https://bmcpulmmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12890-022-02115-7. Newell J, Lolli L, McMillan K. Strength in Numbers: data and science in football.   Aspetar Journal of Sports Medicine, 72-78, 2022https://www.aspetar.com/journal/upload/PDF/2022102010164.pdf. Iqbal T, Simpkin AJ, Roshan D, Glynn N, Killilea J, Walsh J, Molloy G, Ganly S, Ryman H, Coen E, Elahi A, Wijns W, Shahzad A.  Stress Monitoring Using Wearable Sensors: A Pilot Study and Stress-Predict Dataset.  Sensors. 2022; 22(21):8135. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22218135 Kirwan, C., Hynes, L., Hart, N., Newell J., Roshan D., et al.  The multimorbidity collaborative medication review and decision making (MyComrade) study: a pilot cluster randomised trial in two healthcare systems.  Pilot Feasibility Stud 8, 225 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40814-022-01107-y MA Makrooni, D O’Shea, P Geeleher, C Seoighe Random-effects meta-analysis of effect sizes as a unified framework for gene set analysis PLoS Comput Biol 18(10): e1010278. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010278   Mukherjee S, Destrade M, Gower AL. 2022 Representing the stress and strain energy of elastic solids with initial stress and transverse texture anisotropy.    Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 478: 20220255. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2022.0255

Monday, 3 October 2022

On September 14, Giuseppe took part in the one-day workshop "Peatland at the forefront development of multi-physics models" (hybrid format) at the University of Nottingham, UK. Mark Ryder (IRC) and Aisling Mac Aree just started their PhD with Mark. Cian O'Brien (2020 PhD graduate with Rachel and Kevin) is now a Lecturer in Mathematics at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. Hannah Conroy-Broderick (2020 PhD graduate with Michel) is now an IRC postdoctoral fellow at UCD, following a postdoctorate fellowship with Stephan. Last week, Andrew was invited to present "The dangers of age adjusted outcomes" at the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, University of Bristol. Andrew is a co-investigator on the recently announced €1m Cisco-Curam Clare Island Digital Health project, and will hire a postdoc on this project soon: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/university-galway-digital-home-health-project-clare-island Victoria attended a QMATH Masterclass “The mathematics of quantum entanglement via nonlocal games" from 15th-19th August, held at the Centre for the Mathematics of Quantum Theory, University of Copenhagen (Denmark). Victoria presented a poster and gave a talk at the All-Island Quantum Festival held at UCD on 29th and 30th of September.   Outputs:   Tammes, P., Jones, T., Ben-Shlomo, Y. and Simpkin, A.J., 2022. Suicide under the Nazi-regime: a case-control study among Amsterdam Jews. Archives of suicide research, pp.1-14.   A.Khurana, D.Kumar, A.K.Sharma, G.Zurlo, M.M.Joglekar, Taut domains in transversely isotropic electro-magneto-active thin membranes, Int. Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics 147 104228 (2022).   C. O'Brien, R. Quinlan, Alternating sign matrices of finite multiplicative order, Linear Algebra and its Applications, 2022, Vol 651, 332—358 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024379522002178   Li GY, Gower AL, Destrade M, Yun SH.  Non-destructive mapping of stress and strain in soft thin films through sound waves.  Communications Physics. 2022 Sep 17;5(1):1-7. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-022-01000-3.pdf

Thursday, 1 September 2022

Jim published a preprint: “Global Rigidity of Line Constrained Frameworks” by James Cruickshank, Fatemeh Mohammadi, Harshit J Motwani, Anthony Nixon and Shin-ichi Tanigawa, available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09308 Michel, Giuseppe Saccomandi (Perugia and Adjunct Professor in Galway) and Luis Dorfmann (Tufts) guest-edited a Theme Issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, on the impact of the Ogden Model in Nonlinear Elasticity. Ted gave a talk entitled `Idempotents' at CCGTA (in SOUTH FLA) 14 Aug-21 Aug 2022 (Combinatorics, Computing, Group Theory and Applications). He was also co-organiser of this NSF funded conference and chaired one day of the six day meeting. Slides of the talks will soon be available online. Parisa (PhD student supervised by Aaron) presented a talk on her research on PET/CT radiogenomics of non-small cell lung cancers at the Irish Association of Physicists in Medicine (IAPM) Young Investigator session of the 4th European Congress on Medical Physics, 17-20 August 2022 in Dublin. Sai's (PhD student supervised by Aaron) observations of pulsars in the ecliptic plane using the core stations of the International LOFAR radio telescope took place on August 12th. Dúalta (IRC Postdoctoral Fellow) spoke on his work on exploring scenarios for coronal mass ejections & radio bursts on Epsilon Eridani at the IAU Symposium 370: Winds of stars and exoplanets, part of the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Busan, Korea. Michel gave a Plenary talk at the International Conference on Recent Advances in Mechanical Engineering 2022, organised by the Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Jodhpur, 25-27 August 2022 (Online mode unfortunately): Sumaira (PhD student supervised by Aaron) presented her poster entitled ‘LncRNA based antigen load enables prediction of patient’s survival and immunotherapy outcomes in Melanoma’ at the 28th Congress of the European Association for Cancer Research in Seville, Spain. Hannah received IRC funding for a 2-year postdoc at UCD on skin biomechanics with Aisling Ní Annaidh, starting in September. Outputs: Nolan, B., O'Sullivan, B., Golden, A., 'Exploring breast and prostate cancer RNA-seq derived radiosensitivity with the Genomic Adjusted Radiation Dose (GARD) model' (2022) Clinical and Translational Radiation Oncology, 36, P127-131 Michel Destrade, Luis Dorfmann and Giuseppe Saccomandi The Ogden model of rubber mechanics: 50 years of impact on nonlinear elasticity Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2022) 20210332 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2021.0332 Afshin Anssari-Benam, Michel Destrade and Giuseppe Saccomandi Modelling brain tissue elasticity with the Ogden model and an alternative family of constitutive models Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2022) 20210325 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2021.0325 Funding opportunities: IRC Gov of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowships 2023 - information session will be held for this call on 21 September 2022 at 11:30. Please register for the event using this link. Opening September 8th, Closing October 20th IRC Gov of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarships 2023 - information session will be held for this call on 21 September 2022 at 11:30. Please register for the event using this link. Opening September 8th, Closing October 20th SFI Frontiers for the Future Programme - rolling call, 4-5 years, €500,000 - €1,000,000 (direct costs) ERC Starting – Closing 25th October 2022 (2-7 years' experience after Phd) ERC Consolidator – Opening 28th September 2022 – Closing 2nd February 2023 (7-12 years' experience after Phd) ERC Advanced – Opening 8th December 2022 - Closing 23rd May 2023 (For established research leaders with a recognised track record of research achievements) MSCA-PF (Previously IF) - Closing 14th September 2022 MSCA-DN (Previously ITN) - Closing 15th November 2022

Wednesday, 3 August 2022

News Jim Cruickshank gave a talk on “Symmetric pseudotriangulations” at the British Combinatorial Conference (BCC) in Lancaster July 11-15   Jim Cruickshank was a co-author on 3 other talks at the BCC – one invited talk in the Matroids and Discrete Geometry mini-symposium on “Global rigidity of triangulated manifolds” by Shinichi Tanigawa (Univ. of Tokyo) and also contributed talks on “Unique realisations of outerplanar graphs” by Bill Jackson (QMUL) and on “Braced triangulations and rigidity” by Eleftherios Kastis (Lancaster Univ.)   Jim Cruickshank gave a talk at ILAS last month on “Global rigidity for line constrained frameworks” and also co-organised a mini-symposium at ILAS on rigidity and low rank  matrix completion.   Together with Eoin McIvoy, in Engineering, Giuseppe Zurlo will co-supervise the PhD in Engineering of Thomas Hayes, one of our recent graduates, who secured funding from the College of Science and Engineering.   Ted Hurley gave a talk at Ischia Group Theory Conference 20-25 June 2022 entitled ``Groups and Group Rings are simply the best! For Coding Theory''. This was funded by `Retired Staff Research Fund', RSFRS,  of NUIG.   Ted Hurley gave an online talk at `Computing Conference 2022' 14-15 July entitled ``Linear block and convolutional MDS codes to required rate, distance and type''.The conference was due to be held in London but was made virtual due to Covid restrictions.   The corresponding paper appeared as part of the proceedings of the conference just the previous week:     Rex Dark gave an invited keynote talk at the Ischia Conference "Using Galois fields to construct finite p-groups"  Harold Berjamin gave his talk entitled "Acoustoelasticity of soft viscoelastic solids and phononic crystals" (joint work with R. De Pascalis) at the following conferences: the 11th European Solid Mechanics Conference (ESMC 2022, Galway, Ireland), the International Workshop on The Evolving Nonlinear Continuum Panorama (Castro Urdiales, Spain), and the 15th International Conference on Mathematical and Numerical Aspects of Wave Propagation (WAVES 2022, Palaiseau, France).  Giuseppe Zurlo and Michel Destrade were on the organising committee of the 11th European Solid Mechanics Conference which took place in Galway, 4-8 July. With 1,200 participants, it was the largest conference held on campus to date.  Valentina Balbi, Giuseppe Zurlo, Harold Berjamin, Stephan Rudykh and Michel Destrade organised mini-symposia at the conference. They also gave talks, and so did Bharat Tripathi, Hannah Conroy Broderick and Bin Wu.   Michel Destrade was on the scientific committee of the International Workshop on The Evolving Nonlinear Continuum Panorama, July 11-15, Castro Urdiales, Spain, and he presented a talk.   Sairam Pamulaparthi Venkata took part in both conferences.  Hannah Conroy Broderick spoke on "Electro-elastic Lamb waves in dielectric plates" at the European Solid Mechanics Conference in NUI Galway at the beginning of July.  Barry Digby has started a 6-month placement at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle where he will work on developing genomics workflows for variant calling in cancer samples.  Shane O'Connell has started a 5-month placement at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York where he will work on linking genetic data and MRI image features to better understand the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders.  Laura Fahey has a new article on bioRxiv: Comparing the XGBoost machine learning algorithm to polygenic scoring for the prediction of intelligence based on genotype data. L Fahey, DW Morris, P Ó Broin  https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.12.495467v1.abstract  Victoria Sánchez Muñoz attended the SIAM Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh (USA) on 11-15th July. She was the student representative of the SIAM Student Chapter at NUI Galway and also gave a short presentation. (If you want to join the chapter, send her an email v.sanchezmunoz1@nuigalway.ie, any help is welcome to organise this year's one-day Irish annual conference at NUIG!).  Outputs   “Topological inductive constructions for tight surface graphs” by James Cruickshank, Derek Kitson, Steve Power and Qays Shakir. Preprint available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06545   Hurley, Ted (2022). ``Linear Block and Convolutional MDS Codes to Required Rate, Distance and Type''. In: Arai, K. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 507, pp. 129–157, Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10464-0_10  Funding opportunities (keep up to date: https://nuigalwayie.sharepoint.com/sites/Fundyourresearch)   SFI FFP Awards (under the 2021 call) – Open again until further notice – up to €1M in funding.   SFI US-Ireland R&D (“Tripartite”) – NI and ROI funders have their own funding streams available. ROI up to €700,000 for projects with a 1-5 year duration. Rolling call dependent upon US funder timelines.   SFI Royal Society University Research Fellowship. 6th September Deadline. https://www.sfi.ie/funding/funding-calls/sfi-royal-society-university/index.xml   EPSRC-SFI – remains open, subject to EPSRC’s scope and UK lead partner, up to €500k. Rolling call.   ERC Starting – Closing 25th October 2022 (2-7 years' experience after Phd)   ERC Consolidator – Opening 28th September 2022 – Closing 2nd February 2023 (7-12 years' experience after Phd)   ERC Advanced – Opening 8th December 2022 - Closing 23rd May 2023 (For established research leaders with a recognised track record of research achievements)   MSCA-PF (Previously IF) - Opening 12th May 2022 - Closing 14th September 2022   MSCA-DN (Previously ITN) - Opening 12th May 2022 - Closing 15th November 2022  

Friday, 1 July 2022

The School hosted the 24th Conference of the International Linear Algebra Society last week. The conference was an enormous success (after 4 years of planning!) with 260 participants, 240 talks, 6 posters, and attendees from 30 countries. Huge congratulations to organisers Rachel, Niall, Collette, Mary, Kevin and Roisín! Beatrice and Kishor both successfully defended their PhD theses in Statistics during June - congratulations again to both! Laura Fahey (co-supervised by Pilib and Derek Morris in Biochemistry) successfully defended her PhD work on: 'Post-GWAS Analyses of the Polygenic Basis of Schizophrenia and Cognition'. The internal examiner was Prof. Brian McStay and the external examiner was Dr. Richard Anney from Cardiff University. Our summer interns presented on their work today, with an excellent series of presentations: David Cormican and Dmytro Lyubka Sphere Packing, Lattices, and Modular Forms (Graham Ellis) Katrina Watson Alternating Sign and Sign-Restricted Matrices (Rachel Quinlan) James Nohilly Quantum Circuit Simplification and Extraction (Mark Howard) James Hayes Peto's Paradox (Cathal Seoighe) Robin Pfeiffer Physics informed Neural Networks for Numerical Analysis (Niall Madden David Acton Measuring Quantum Tunnelling Dwell Time Using Larmor Precession (Michael Tuite) Koushik has been selected and funded to attend the conference Young Group Theorists Workshop: Exploring New Connections in SwissMAP Research Station in Les Diablerets, Switzerland from 4-9 September. He will be presenting his research work on Construction of Specht Modules for Finite Type-B Coxeter Groups in a poster there. Elif Adıgüzel, an Electrical Engineering & Physics student from Koç University, Istanbul started an Erasmus+ internship working with Aaron. Elif will be using the I-LOFAR radiotelescope to study planetary lightning. Sumaira (PhD student working with Aaron) presented her poster entitled "LncRNA based antigen load enables prediction of patient’s survival and immunotherapy outcomes in Melanoma" at the European Association for Cancer Research Congress 20-23 June, Seville, Spain. Together with Prof. Evan Keane (TCD), Aaron organised two field trips/workshops to the I-LOFAR radiotelescope in Birr on June 16th and June 23rd, bringing together graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from both institutions to share experiences and research expertise. Aaron gave an invited talk on "Monitoring Space Weather over the Arctic" to the Network of Arctic Researchers in Ireland (NARI) meeting, held on June 20th at the Hodson Bay Hotel in Athlone. Aaron co-chaired the session "AI4EO - Applications for Land and Water" at the European Space Agency's Living Planet Symposium, held in Bonn between 23-27 May. Aaron (virtually) attended the Science Working Group meeting for the MORFEO (Multiconjugate adaptive Optics For ELT Observations) consortium held in Grenoble between 31 May / 1st June. The ELT ('Extremely Large Telescope'!) currently being built by the European Southern Observatory will be on completion in 2027 the largest optical telescope ever built - NUI Galway is part of the Franco-Italian-Irish consortium to build the MORFEO instrument. Sarah gave a talk on her work on: 'Single-cell characterisation of the hematopoietic bone marrow interactome in health and disease' at the VIBE 2022 conference held in UL. Shane also gave a talk at VIBE on: 'Genetic association studies of deep learning derived intermediate neuroimaging phenotypes'. Sophie gave a talk at VIBE on 'An Evolutionary Perspective on Peto's Paradox' Anna gave a talk at VIBE on 'Epigenetic Aging and its Association with Adult Psychiatric Risk' Victoria presented a poster and gave a talk in the minisymposium “Mathematics of quantum information” at the 24th Conference of the International Linear Algebra Society, held at NUI Galway between 20-24th June 2022 A few weeks ago (13-17 June) Michel taught a graduate course at the Centre International des Sciences Mecaniques in Udine, Italy, as part of an advanced school on the topic of instability in solids. There were 6 lecturers, 18 on-site international students (including Sairam Pamulaparthi Venkata, who's doing a PhD with Valentina and Michel), and 12 online students (including Andrei Cherkasov, who's doing a PhD with Stephan). Outputs Quan Zhang and Stephan Rudykh. "Magneto-deformation and transverse elastic waves in hard-magnetic soft laminates." Mechanics of Materials 169 (2022): 104325. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmat.2022.104325 Elena Tosti, Ana S Almeida, Tam TT Tran, Mariel Barbachan e Silva, Pilib Ó Broin, Robert Dubin, Ken Chen, Amanda P Beck, Andrew S Mclellan, Eduardo Vilar-Sanchez, Aaron Golden, Paul W O’Toole, Winfried Edelmann: Loss of MMR and TGFBR2 increases the susceptibility to microbiota-dependent inflammation-associated colon cancer. Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 2022  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352345X22000959 Zhu, Y., Lussier, A. A., Smith, A. D. A. C., Simpkin, A. J., Suderman, M. J., Walton, E., Relton, C. L., & Dunn, E. C. (2022). Examining the epigenetic mechanisms of childhood adversity and sensitive periods: A gene set-based approach. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 105854. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2022.105854

Monday, 30 May 2022

The joint meeting of Groups in Galway and the Irish Geometry Conference took place on campus from the 18th until the 20th of May.  The meeting was organised by Angela, Tobias, John B and Martin K. Jim gave a talk at the University of Umea Discrete Maths Seminar. Title “Rigidity, Combinatorics and Topology” Koushik Paul has won funding to attend a workshop on Structure of Group Algebras Over Local Rings in Ambleside, Lake District, University of Cumbria, UK from 23rd to 27th August, 2022. Davood gave a talk "Challenge your limits!" at the Conference on Applied Statistics in Ireland (CASI) in Cork. Pouyan Nejadi gave a talk on "Movement Pattern Discovery With Applications In Elite Soccer" at CASI. Beatrice Charamba presented a poster on "Bayesian Multiple Imputation For Missing Functional Data" at CASI. Lydia King presented a poster on "The Role Of Copy Number Alteration And Gene Expression Data In Stratifying Breast Cancer Patients Within Predictive Models For Survival Outcome" at CASI. Anna Grossbach presented a poster on "Modelling Epigenetic Age And Its Association With Early Life Adversity Over Time" at CASI. Amanda Forde presented a poster on "More Accurate And Unbiased Associations In Genetic Association Studies" at CASI. Martin K will have a research visitor from the University of Tennessee on campus this week. His name is Jason DeVito and he will also give a talk on Thursday, 2 June, in the School Seminar. Valentina won €8000 from the College of Science and Engineering Strategic Research (Millennium) Fund for research on "Characterisation of the 3D Viscoelastic behaviour of brain tissues in torsion" Bharat was successful in securing €10000 from the College Millennium Fund for research on Traumatic brain injury modelling Pilib was awarded €10k from the College Millennium Fund to recruit a Research Assistant in order to advance work from his group on batch correction and integration of multi-omic single-cell data using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Pilib has been invited to join the SFI ADAPT Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology (https://www.adaptcentre.ie/) where he will collaborate with researchers in the Digital Content Transformation (DCT) Strand focusing on AI for Digital Health. Harold gave an invited lecture at the SPIN ITN Workshop “Physics & dynamic processes” in Carcans, France. Michel gave talks at the Séminaire de l'Institut Langevin, Université De Paris / Sorbonne, on May 10; at the International Workshop: A symposium on continuum questions, University of Glasgow, on May 12; at the Mathematics Colloquium, University of Manchester, on May 18; and at Elasticity Day, University College London, on May 19. Through a partnership with Contego Sports, a company manufacturing rugby headguards, Bharat and Michel will be recruiting a postdoctoral fellow in the autumn to model brain concussion events. Oriane Armand, Masters student from University of Grenoble Alps, France, is working with Bharat since April 4th till September 9th as an Erasmus trainee. She is working on deep learning techniques for medical image segmentation. Julia Kompanowska (2nd year UG student) will be starting her six-weeks summer internship with Bharat from June supported by WiSTEM NUI Galway. Sarah Ennis has a new paper on BioRxiv: 'Single-cell characterisation of the hematopoietic bone marrow interactome in health and disease'. Sarah Ennis, Alessandra Conforte, Tatiana Cichocka, Sukhraj Pal Dhami, Pamela Nicholson, Philippe Krebs, Pilib Ó Broin, Eva Szegezdi. Giuseppe has a new PhD student in Applied Mathematics, Mohsen Daman, who works under a Double PhD Agreement with Università di Pisa. Roisin Hill has been awarded IRC funding for a 2-year postdoc with Natala Kopteva in UL starting in Sep 2022. John Andrew has started a PhD with Andrew, working on functional data analysis. Giuseppe gave a talk "Incompatible Surface Growth" at the Workshop "Discrete and Continuum Modeling of Natural Systems, May 29th -- June 3rd, 2022, Fasano Italy". Outputs Amin Alibakhshi, Weiqiu Chen, Michel Destrade, Nonlinear Vibration and Stability of a Dielectric Elastomer Balloon Based on a Strain-Stiffening Model, Journal of Elasticity (https://rdcu.be/cObIY). Jim Cruickshank, Bill Jackson (QMUL) and Shin-ichi Tanigawa (Tokyo) “Vertex Splitting, Coincident Realisations and Global Rigidity of Braced Triangulations” accepted for publication in Discrete and Computational Geometry. Lussier, A.A., Zhu, Y., Smith, B.J., Simpkin, A.J., Smith, A.D., Suderman, M.J., Walton, E., Relton, C., Ressler, K.J. and Dunn, E.C., 2022. Sensitive periods for the effect of childhood adversity on DNA methylation: Updated results from a prospective, longitudinal study. Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science. Funding opportunities (keep up to date: https://nuigalwayie.sharepoint.com/sites/Fundyourresearch) DETE DTIF 2022 – Call 5 – Advanced Manufacturing. 21st July Deadline. Must be led by an enterprise with RPOs taking no more than 50% of total funding. EI Commercialization Fund – €80-350k for research directed to marketable outcomes. Next full application deadline is 1st July 2022, but Feasibility and invited full proposals are still possible at any time. SFI Discover Programme Call – to empower and inspire deep public engagement – closing date June 21st, up to €300,000 with up to 2 years duration SFI FFP Awards (under the 2021 call) – Open again until further notice – up to €1M in funding. SFI US-Ireland R&D (“Tripartite”) – NI and ROI funders have their own funding streams available. ROI up to €700,000 for projects with a 1-5 year duration. Rolling call dependent upon US funder timelines. EPSRC-SFI – remains open, subject to EPSRC’s scope and UK lead partner, up to €500k. Rolling call. SFI Pathway Postdoctoral Fellowships – will open shortly with a July 22nd EOI deadline for applicants ***There will be an internal competition before the EOI stage – max of 16 STEMM and 8 AHSS applications per university*** Details to follow from Research Office. ERC Starting – Opening 12th July 2022 - Closing 25th October 2022 (2-7 years' experience after Phd) ERC Consolidator – Opening 28th September 2022 – Closing 2nd February 2023 (7-12 years' experience after Phd) ERC Advanced – Opening 8th December 2022 - Closing 23rd May 2023 (For established research leaders with a recognised track record of research achievements) MSCA-PF (Previously IF) - Opening 12th May 2022 - Closing 14th September 2022 MSCA-DN (Previously ITN) - Opening 12th May 2022 - Closing 15th November 2022  

Monday, 9 May 2022

News Thank you all for attending and contributing to our School Research Day on April 13th Shane won best talk for "Magnetic Resonance Imaging-based Deep Learning Predictive Models of Brain Disorders: A Systematic Review of Modelling Practices, Transparency, and Interpretability" Vikrant won best poster for "Modelling Linear Wave Propagation using Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs)" Best runners-up were:Kelvin for "Computing invariants of knotted manifolds"Amanda for "More accurate and unbiased associations in genetic association studies"Pouyan for "Movement pattern discovery with application in sport science"Mohdi for "Mathematically Modelling Solid Dispersions"Peter for "DGA Structures on minimal free resolutions of binomial edge ideals" The 24th Conference of the International Linear Algebra Society (deferred from 2020) will take place in NUI Galway from June 20 to 24, www.ilas2020.ie Róisín Hill has started as postdoctoral researcher, funded through an Academic Carers' Grant awarded to Niall Both Róisín and Niall presented talks at a recent workshop on numerical analysis of boundary layer problems in Hagen (Germany) Pilib gave an invited talk on: "Deep learning and single cell RNA-seq:Understanding and predicting response to TIL therapies" at the European Society for Human Genetics Course on Precision Medicine held in Dublin on 25th-27th April. Kevin was awarded a bursary to attend the European Society for Human Genetics Course on Precision Medicine held in Dublin on 25th-27th April. Mariel, Pilib and Aaron are co-authors on a manuscript: "Loss of MMR and TGFBR2 increases the susceptibility to microbiota-dependent colon cancer", which has been accepted for publication in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology. This was work carried out with colleagues in NY. Outputs Anssari-Benam, A., Bucchi, A., Destrade, M., Saccomandi, G. The Generalised Mooney Space for Modelling the Response of Rubber-Like Materials. Journal of Elasticity (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10659-022-09889-1 Destrade, M., Saccomandi, G. Plane-polarised finite-amplitude shear waves in deformed incompressible materials. Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids, (2022) 10812865221089588. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F10812865221089588 Quinlan, Rachel, Moumita Shau, and Fernando Szechtman. Linear diophantine equations in several variables. Linear Algebra and its Applications (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.laa.2021.12.020 Scott P. MacLachlan, Niall Madden, and Thái Anh Nhan. A Boundary-Layer Preconditioner for Singularly Perturbed Convection Diffusion. SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (2022) 43:2, 561-583. https://doi.org/10.1137/21M1443297 Emeriau, Pierre-Emmanuel, Mark Howard, and Shane Mansfield. "Quantum advantage in information retrieval." PRX Quantum 3, no. 2 (2022): 020307. https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.3.020307 Khurana A., Joglekar M.M., Zurlo G., Electromechanical stability of wrinkled dielectric elastomers, International Journal of Solids and Structures (accepted, April 2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2022.111613  

Friday, 1 April 2022

Our School Research Day will take place on Wednesday April 13th in the Orbsen building, starting at 9.20, see full programme here.  We have an excellent line up, I hope to see many of you on the day! A workshop on Statistical Approaches to Understanding the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Island of Ireland is taking place on Monday April 25th in the ILAS Building in NUI Galway, timetable and registration details are here. Our School will host the 24th Conference of the International Linear Algebra Society from June 20 to 24 (see http://ilas2020.ie/). Abstract submission and registration are now open, with more than 300 participants expected! Dr Wanis Nafo was successful in his application for a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship to come work here with Michel. Wanis holds a BSc from the University of Benghazi, Lybia, and an MSc and PhD from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong. His project with Michel is on "Localised Cancer Therapy" and will be funded by the European Commission (€200k) Pilib has been awarded €428k as part of a North-South application on liquid biopsies with colleagues from TCD/QUB (total award of ~€4M). This will fund 2 x postdoctoral researchers and associated cloud computing/research costs over the next 4 yrs Pilib has been appointed as the NUIG representative to the executive board of the recently-established Irish Translational Medicine Network. This network is currently working to secure Ireland's membership in EATRIS (https://eatris.eu/), the European infrastructure for translational medicine Mariel and Shane are co-authors on a manuscript from Karen Doyle's group which has been accepted at Frontiers in Neurology Shane has been awarded a place on the 2022 ETS Summer School on Deep Learning for Medical Imaging which will take place in Montréal, Canada in July Victoria has received a high-level scientific mobility grant given by the French Embassy in Ireland. She will be working for a month in May 2022 with Dr. Damian Markham in the Quantum Information team in LIP6, Sorbonne Université (Paris) Mark Howard was awarded “Research Fellows Enhanced Research Expenses” worth €75k to help fund a PhD studentship and hopefully some Summer Studentships “Rigidity of Simplicial Complexes” was presented by James Cruickshank (NUIG), Bill Jackson (QMUL) (presenter), Shinichi Tanigawa (Univ. of Tokyo) at the 53rd Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing in Florida Atlantic University on March 9. Link to abstract: http://www.math.fau.edu/combinatorics/abstracts/jackson020722.pdf Lydia presented a poster “Assessing the Role of Genomics Data in Stratifying Patients within Predictive Models for Breast Cancer Survival Outcome” at the Irish Association for Cancer Research (IACR) Annual Conference on the 30th of March Andrew now leads the Modelling and Informatics Cluster of the Ryan Institute Mark Ryder has won an IRC postgraduate award to fund a PhD with Mark Howard on quantum computing Outputs Fay-Watt V, O’Connor S, Roshan D, Romeo AC, Longo VD, Sullivan FJ. The impact of a fasting mimicking diet on the metabolic health of a prospective cohort of patients with prostate cancer: a pilot implementation study. Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases. 2022 Mar 21:1-6. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41391-022-00528-3 Morrissey EC, Byrne M, Casey B, Casey D, Gillespie P, Hobbins A, Lowry M, McCarthy E, Newell J, Roshan D, Sharma S. Improving outcomes among young adults with type 1 diabetes: the D1 Now pilot cluster randomised controlled trial. Pilot and feasibility studies. 2022 Dec;8(1):1-20. https://pilotfeasibilitystudies.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40814-022-00986-5 ​Berjamin H, De Pascalis R. “Acoustoelastic analysis of soft viscoelastic solids with application to pre-stressed phononic crystals.” International Journal of Solids and Structures 241 (2022), 111529. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2022.111529 Rosanna Rossi, Oana Madalina Mereuta, Mariel Barbachan E Silva, Sara Molina Gil, Andrew Douglas, Abhay Pandit, Michael Gilvarry, Ray Mccarthy, Shane O'Connell, Ciara Tierney, Klearchos Psychogios, Georgios Tsivgoulis, István Szikora, Turgut Tatlisumak, Alexandros Rentzos, John Thornton, Pilib Ó Broin, Karen Doyle. 'Potential biomarkers of Acute Ischemic Stroke etiology revealed by mass spectrometry-based proteomic characterization of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded blood clots' (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2022.854846/abstract) J. Blackwell, M.J. Krasny, A. O'Brien, K. Ashkan, J. Galligan, M. Destrade, N. Colgan. Proton resonance frequency shift thermometry: A review of modern clinical practices. Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 55 (2022) 389-403. https://doi.org/10.1002/jmri.27446 Funding opportunities An information session is being hosted by Claire Bennett about research funding opportunities in the areas of informatics and data science on Tuesday, 5 April between 10.30 and 11.30am in room IT125 (IT Building). Anyone interested in attending should complete this form to help guide attendance and scope SFI Frontiers for the Future Awards https://www.sfi.ie/funding/funding-calls/frontiers-for-the-future/index.xml SFI Discover Programme Science Week Call 2022 https://www.sfi.ie/funding/funding-calls/sfi-science-week-call/ The Research Office portal contains lots of information on upcoming calls https://nuigalwayie.sharepoint.com/sites/Fundyourresearch

Wednesday, 2 March 2022

Cathal Seoighe's  group have begun a collaboration on a project led by UCD to discover severity markers for childhood pneumonia in Malawi. Funding of €26,700 will come to NUIG to support a short-term postdoctoral researcher contract. Andrew Simpkin has two new PhD students who have started in 2022 - Anna Grossbach (epigenetic data analysis) and John Andrew (functional data analysis).  The School Research Day will take place on Wednesday April 13th. As usual we have a student poster session, but this year we are hoping that some PhD students will present their research in our blitz session. Please let Mark Howard know if you would like to take part! Outputs Berjamin H, Chockalingam S. “Shear shock formation in incompressible viscoelastic solids.” Wave Motion 110 (2022), 102899. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wavemoti.2022.102899 Lussier, A.A., Zhu, Y., Smith, B.J., Simpkin, A.J., Smith, A.D., Suderman, M.J., Walton, E., Ressler, K.J. and Dunn, E.C., 2022. "Updates to data versions and analytic methods influence the reproducibility of results from epigenome-wide association studies." Epigenetics, pp.1-16. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15592294.2022.2028072 Funding opportunities Wellcome Career Development Awards (Mid-career) Application deadline: 29 March 2022, 17:00 BST Wellcome Discovery Awards (established researchers) Application deadline: 24 March 2022, 17:00 GMT SFI Frontiers for the Future Awards

Tuesday, 1 February 2022

The second annual CRT symposium is taking place (online) on February 3 and 4. The symposium was due to take place in-person in September. Due to the shift online there may still be some places available for late registrations at https://linktr.ee/sysgen21 Martin Kerin has a new PhD student, Badriah Safarji, who will be studying differential geometry Martin Kerin had a paper, written together with Jason DeVito (University of Tennessee) and Fernando Galaz García (Durham University), accepted by the Indiana University Mathematics Journal. [Due to the backlog at the journal, it probably won't appear in print for some time.] The Irish Geometry Seminar will resume on 1 February [new webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/irishgeomseminar/home] Aaron Golden has been awarded 13 nights in late February/early March on the 1.8m Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope at the Mount Graham International Observatory in Arizona to observe the nearby young triple brown dwarf system VHS J125601.92–125723.9, and in particular characterise the meteorological conditions of the exoplanet analogue VHS 1256–1257 b, scheduled to be observed by the James Webb Space Telescope in May of this year. Lydia King (PhD candidate in the CRT Genomics Data Science) - along with Simone, Emma and Aaron - had her second first-author paper 'GNOSIS: an R Shiny app supporting cancer genomics survival analysis with cBioPortal' published in HRB Open Research. Lydia is presenting a poster “Assessing the Role of Genomics Data in Stratifying Patients within Predictive Models for Breast Cancer Survival Outcome” at the annual CRT conference (Systems Genomics Summit) on the 4th of Feb.   Prof. Patrick Farrell (Oriel College Oxford) a graduate of about 13 years ago, was a winner of an LMS (London Math. Soc.) Junior Whitehead Prize, along with 9 others.  Outputs Martin L. Newell. On Groups of Commutator Symmetries , Advances in Group Theory and Applications, 12 (2021), pp. 1–18 Moloney, S., McGrath, B. M., Roshan, D., & Gethin, G. (2021). The Personal Impact of Daily Wound Care for Hidradenitis Suppurativa. Dermatology, 110. https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/520262 Dark, Rex, Arnold D. Feldman, and María Dolores Pérez-Ramos. "Nilpotent length and system permutability." Journal of Algebra 589 (2022): 287-322. John Haslett, Andrew C Parnell, John Hinde, Rafael de Andrade Moral (2021) Modelling excess zeros in count data: A new perspective on modelling approaches. International Statistical Review  doi: 10.1111/insr.12479 Murray Aitkin, John Hinde and Brian Francis (2022) Reflections on statistical modelling: A conversation with Murray Aitkin, Statistical Modelling, 22(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/1471082X211060560 Shirin Moghaddam, John Newell and John Hinde (2022) A Bayesian approach to imputation of survival data. To appear in  Stats. Francis, B and Hinde, J. (2022) Guest Editors: Editorial : Special Issue in Honour of Murray Aitkin, Statistical Modelling, 22(1). King L., Flaus A., Coughlan S., Holian, E., Golden, A. (2021) 'GNOSIS: an R Shiny app supporting cancer genomics survival analysis with cBioPortal' [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. HRB Open Res 2022, 5:8 (https://doi.org/10.12688/hrbopenres.13476.1) Ó Fionnagáin, D., Kavanagh R.D., Vidotto A.A., Jeffers S.V., Petit P., Marsden S., Morin J., Golden, A. (2021) 'Coronal Mass Ejections and Type II Radio Emission Variability during a Magnetic Cycle on the Solar-type Star epsilon Eridani',  The Astrophysical Journal, 924, 115 (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac35de) Funding opportunities Wellcome Career Development Awards (Mid-career) Application deadline: 29 March 2022, 17:00 BST Wellcome Discovery Awards (established researchers) Application deadline: 24 March 2022, 17:00 GMT SFI Frontiers for the Future Awards. 

Wednesday, 5 January 2022

Prof. Ted Hurley was an invited keynote speaker to a session of the conference "Coding Theory and Cryptography'' at the University of Bahrain in June 2021. Of necessity the conference was held online. Title: `Unit-derived codes'. (Available online).  The work is a report on the culmination of successful efforts to derive best codes to desired rate and desired error-correcting capability, (see paper `Maximum distance.. ' below for example.) Prof. Ted Hurley was appointed External Examiner for Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) for their new undergraduate and graduate programmes on Data Analytics Sarah Ennis is presenting her poster: 'Single Cell Transcriptomics Revealed Molecular Alterations in AML Cell Clusters Relevant to Refractory Disease at Relapse' at the American Society of Haematology (ASH) annual meeting in Atlanta, GA. Shane O'Connell presented results from his recent preprint: 'Magnetic Resonance Imaging-based Deep Learning Predictive Models of Brain Disorders: A Systematic Review of Modelling Practices, Transparency, and Interpretability' at the Galway Neuroscience Annual Research Day held last week. Eamon McAndrew is at the Institute Pasteur in Lille for two weeks as part of a reciprocal visit funded by Pilib's Ulysses award. Victoria Sánchez Muñoz received the Kovalevskaya Travel Grant to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians ICM 2022 in St. Petersburg, Russia, in July 2022 Prof. Michel Destrade and Dr. Valentina Balbi will have a new PhD student, Sairam Pamulaparthi Venkata, starting in January as part of the Marie Curie ITN project XS-Meta. Sairam will work on soft meta-materials instabilities. Dúalta and Aaron Golden are coordinating an international consortium of astronomers and planetary scientists studying the planet Uranus. Using radio telescopes located in Ireland, Sweden and France, the goal is to try and detect lightning associated with storms in the planet's gaseous atmosphere, previously observed by NASA's Voyager spacecraft during its flyby in 1986. Dúalta was awarded 18 hours of time on the European Very Large Baseline Interferometric Network of radio telescopes that span the Eurasian and African continents, with the aim of characterising the stellar wind environment around the nearby binary star system Lambda Andromedae. Joseph Gildea, a former graduate student here, PhD 2008,  was promoted to Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chester. Outputs Ted Hurley "Unique builders for classes of matrices",  Special Matrices, (Special Issue on Combinatorial matrices), Vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, 52-65. https://doi.org/10.1515/spma-2020-0122 Ted Hurley, Donny Hurley, Barry Hurley "Maximum distance separable codes to order'', Global Journal of Science Frontier Research, [S.l.], Vol 21, no. 4, 1-13, 2021. Niall has had a paper accepted for publication in the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications - "A Boundary-Layer Preconditioner for Singularly Perturbed Convection Diffusion". It's joint work with Anh Thái Nhan (formerly of NUIG) and Scott MacLachlan (MUN)https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13468 Alan Agresti (2021) "The foundations of statistical science: A history of textbook presentations (with discussion from John Hinde)". Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics Vol. 35, No. 4, 657–698 https://doi.org/10.1214/21-BJPS518

Wednesday, 1 December 2021

Vikrant Pratap is new PhD candidate in our School. He started on October 1st 2021 under the supervision of Bharat. He will be working on "Surrogate modelling of shear shock waves in brain in context of traumatic brain injury".  Congratulations to Donal, who has once again been recognised on Clarivate’s 2021 global list of highly cited researchers (https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/highly-cited-researchers-ireland) Victoria Sánchez Muñoz and Peter Phelan are running a seminar group for postgraduate students within the school. More information from Peter: "I'm pleased to announce that the School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences postgraduate seminar group is now running. Meetings will be held both online (through Zoom) and in person (in ABD-G021) every Thursday at 12pm. We intend for presentations to be short (between 15-30 minutes), and accessible to a general maths postgraduate audience. Please let Victoria (v.sanchezmunoz1@nuigalway.ie) or me (P.Phelan3@nuigalway.ie) know if you have any questions, or if you wish to be added to our mailing list." Niall presented a talk (remotely, unfortunately) on "A Boundary-Layer Preconditioner for Singularly Perturbed Convection Diffusion Problems" at a conference on Numerical Methods and Scientific Computing at the CIRM, Luminy, Nov 8-12.  Dúalta and Aaron had their paper 'Coronal mass ejections and type II radio emission variability during a magnetic cycle on the solar-type star ε Eridani' accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.02284 Two PhD students from the CRT have joined Pilib's group:  Kevin Ryan is a graduate of the MSc in Biomedical Genomics Programme and will work on a project looking at tumour neoantigens and stromal cell signalling in breast cancer. Kevin is co-supervised by Dr. Laura Barkley in the Lambe Institute for Translational Research.  Karen Guerrero Vazquez is a CS graduate from Mexico who will work on therapeutic target discovery for muscle wasting in ageing and disease. Karen is co-supervised with Dr. Kasia Whysall in the School of Medicine. Barry Digby has been delivering a six-week course on Genomics Data Science for secondary school students with Galway Youth Academy. Sarah Ennis will give a poster presentation on: 'Single-cell characterisation of the hematopoietic bone marrow niche in health and disease' at next week's Systems Genomics Summit. Two new preprints from Pilib's group: Mariel is a co-author on a manuscript describing work carried out with collaborators in the US and Japan on the role of the TBX1 transcription factor in neurodevelopment: 'Transcriptional regulation of neonatal neural stem cells is a determinant of social behavior'. (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.12.468452v1) Shane is first author on a manuscript examining reproducibility/clinical utility of deep-learning models in MRI imaging analysis: 'Magnetic Resonance Imaging-based Deep Learning Predictive Models of Brain Disorders: A Systematic Review of Modelling Practices, Transparency, and Interpretability' (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.20.21266620v1)   Outputs   Bharat B. Tripathi, Sandhya Chandrasekaran, and Gianmarco Pinton. "Super-resolved shear shock focusing in the human head". Brain Multiphysics, 2, 100033, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brain.2021.100033 John Haslett, Andrew C. Parnell, John Hinde, Rafael de Andrade Moral. "Modelling Excess Zeros in Count Data: A New Perspective on Modelling Approaches". International Statistical Review, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/insr.12479

Monday, 1 November 2021

Valentina has a new PhD student, Griffen Small who has started this month. Griffen is doing a PhD in applied maths and his project is about the mathematical modelling of the viscoelastic behaviour of soft tissues. Harold started to work on the “Modelling and simulation of impact waves in brain matter” under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101023950 Aaron and Pilib have been granted a US patent (US Patent 11,092,591) on their work with colleagues in New York to identify blood-based biomarkers for radiation injury. This work has applications in the triage and monitoring of exposed individuals following radiological incidents. Pilib's group hosted Alexandre Petellier from Fabien Delahaye's lab at the Institut Pasteur de Lille for two weeks as part of an IRC Ulysses award. The two groups have started a collaboration around the use of deep learning methods for batch correction of single-cell RNA-sequencing data in fetal growth disorders. Pilib appeared on the Iris Aniar radio programme (RnaG) on 21/9 to discuss the DTIF award on developing cancer immunotherapies and on 27/10 to discuss his group's work in predicting antibody-mediated graft rejection in kidney transplant patients.  

Friday, 1 October 2021

Michael Tuite has been appointed as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.  Mark Howard delivered an invited talk “A resource theory for quantum computation” at the Irish Mathematical Society September Meeting in MTU/UCC The online Irish Geometry Seminar which Martin Kerin organises has restarted and will run throughout the semester: http://www.maths.nuigalway.ie/~kerin/irishgeomseminar.shtml Declan Bennett had a paper accepted for publication in Scientific Reports Declan gave an oral presentation at the Irish Society for Human Genetics (ISHG) annual conference Rebecca Mahoney gave an oral presentation at ISHG and won the prize for best PhD student presentation Victoria Sánchez Muñoz and Michael McGettrick published a paper in International Game Theory Review in January 2021. The title of it is "Nash Equilibria in certain two-choice multi-player games played on the ladder graph" https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219198920500206 In May 2021, Victoria with others around Ireland organised a workshop to start QIreland, which is a local branch of QWorld (https://qworld.net/). This international community aims to popularise quantum technologies across the world. Victoria is currently one of the coordinators of QIreland (https://qworld.net/qireland/) In June 2021 Victoria applied to (online) FameLab Ireland 2021 in the Galway Heat. Here's the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSfeUfdt5s&list=PL5CGywsweUHJ7XbZfoODUo0RcVQhVjfHh&index=10 . Victoria won the audience award for the Galway Heat. Victoria gave a talk on the same paper at the 8th European Congress of Mathematics in the Mini-symposium section "Probability - A game theory and its applications". It was on the 24th June 2021. On 27th July 2021, Victoria also gave a talk on the same at the Sheffield SIAM-IMA Conference and won the 3rd prize for posters in the postgraduate category.   Outputs Kilmartin, Darren, ... Roshan, Davood, et al. "Intra-Tumour Heterogeneity Is One of the Main Sources of Inter-Observer Variation in Scoring Stromal Tumour Infiltrating Lymphocytes in Triple Negative Breast Cancer." Cancers 13.17 (2021): 4410. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/13/17/4410 H. Berjamin, M. Destrade, “A hyperbolic framework for shear sound beams in nonlinear solids”, Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation 103 (2021), 106036. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cnsns.2021.106036

Tuesday, 31 August 2021

Dr. Cian O'Brien is leaving us to take up a lecturer position at Cardiff University James Hayes completed his internship in Cathal Seoighe's group. Işık Gurhan joined Cathal Seoighe's group as an Erasmus visiting researcher Ian Craig has joined as a part-time PhD student with Michael McGettrick Pouyan Nejadi and John Newell have secured funding from the IRC Employment-Based Postgraduate Programme (2 years funding) John Newell and Carl Scarrott are leading the analysis of the UniCov trial and have secured SFI Postdoctoral funding (6 months) The EPA has published the Aaron Golden's Research Report: GRACE Monitoring of Groundwater over Ireland – A Feasibility Study. Using satellite measurements to determine groundwater variations across Ireland (video here) Outputs Kherreh, N., Cleary, S. & Seoighe, C. No evidence that HLA genotype influences the driver mutations that occur in cancer patients. Cancer Immunol Immunother (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00262-021-03028-w e Silva, M.B., Narloch, P.H., Dorn, M. and Broin, P.Ó., 2021, June. Optimisation of Cancer Status Prediction Pipelines using Bio-Inspired Computing. In 2021 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) (pp. 442-449). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9504911 Pedlar CR, Newell J, Scarrott C, Simpkin A, et al. Medical encounters at community-based physical activity events (parkrun) in the UK British Journal of Sports Medicine doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2021-104256 de Paula Oliveira, Newell J. et al. Modelling menstrual cycle length in athletes using state-space models. Sci Rep 11, 16972 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-95960-1 Pierre Murchan, Cathal Ó’Brien, Shane O’Connell, Ciara S. McNevin, Anne-Marie Baird, Orla Sheils, Pilib Ó Broin, and Stephen P. Finn: Deep Learning of Histopathological Features for the Prediction of Tumour Molecular Genetics. Diagnostics. 2021; 11(8):1406. https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics11081406 Heenan-Daly, D., Coughlan, S., Dillane, E., & Doyle Prestwich, B. (2021). Volatile Compounds From Bacillus, Serratia, and Pseudomonas Promote Growth and Alter the Transcriptional Landscape of Solanum tuberosum in a Passively Ventilated Growth System. Frontiers in Microbiology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2021.628437 Ian Walsh, Dmytro Fishman, Dario Garcia-Gasulla, Tiina Titma, Gianluca Pollastri, ELIXIR Machine Learning Focus Group, Jennifer Harrow, Fotis E. Psomopoulos & Silvio C. E. Tosatto DOME: recommendations for supervised machine learning validation in biology. Nature Methods (2021) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-021-01205-4  

Tuesday, 27 July 2021

The School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics Summer Internship Programme has been running for the past six weeks, thanks to funding from the School and the College of Science & Engineering. Thanks again to all the supervisors and students. To hear about all of the excellent work which has been done, there will be a series of short presentations on this Friday July 30th from 12-13.30 and everyone is welcome to join: 12.00 - 12.15 Anton Sohn + Michael McGloin (Dr. Rachel Quinlan) 12.15 - 12.30 David Flanagan (Dr. Aaron Golden) 12.30 - 12.45 Jordan McCarney (Dr. Mark Howard) 12.45 - 13.00 Lijun Zho (Dr. Ronan Egan) 13.00 - 13.15 Maeve Dunne (Dr. Davood Roshan) 13.15 - 13.30 Sean Tobin (Dr. Giuseppe Zurlo) Zoom link to attend: https://nuigalway-ie.zoom.us/j/92137314116?pwd=d1ZZUDBPaWQxZkdPVjlxQW13bHZPQT09 Professor Cathal Seoige wrote a blog post on the future of genomics in Ireland https://blog.hrbopenresearch.org/2021/06/22/the-future-of-genomics-in-ireland/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=JQB19071&utm_term=post Dr Mark Howard's PhD student Billy Ray has (belatedly) been awarded an IRC postgrad award to cover years 2-4 of his PhD. PhD student Beatrice Charamba gave two talks at prestigious international conferences last week; these were meant to be delivered in Bilbao and Lyon but instead given online from the warmer climes of Galway! Beatrice Charamba, Andrew J Simpkin. Bayesian concurrent functional regression for sparse data. International Workshop on Statistical Modelling 2021 Beatrice Charamba and Andrew Simpkin. Bayesian concurrent functional regression for sensor data. International Society for Clinical Biostatistics 2021 Two CRT students in Dr Pilib Ó Broin's group have secured additional funding of >€20k for their projects through the Data Generation Fund.  Barry's project is on: 'Elucidating the regulatory role of non-coding RNAs in enzalutamide resistant prostate cancer'.  Pierre's project (co-supervised with Prof. Stephen Finn in TCD) is on 'circRNA expression as a biomarker in upper GI cancer.' Dr Andrew Simpkin attended a Ryan Institute meeting with Dr Jared Gerlach from the research office and he shared these slides on funding opportunities, which may be of interest. Outputs J.-P. Remeniera, M. Bulot, J.-L. Gennisson, F. Patat, M. Destrade, G. Bacle. Acousto-elasticity of transversely isotropic incompressible soft tissues: Characterization of skeletal striated muscle. Physics in Medicine and Biology, 66 (2021) 145009. pdf Zhu, Y., Simpkin, A.J., Suderman, M.J., Lussier, A.A., Walton, E., Dunn, E.C. and Smith, A.D., 2021. A Structured Approach to Evaluating Life-Course Hypotheses: Moving Beyond Analyses of Exposed Versus Unexposed in the-Omics Context. American Journal of Epidemiology, 190(6), pp.1101-1112. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/190/6/1101/5943467 McKay, B.A., Delaney, J.A., Simpkin, A., Larkin, T., Murray, A., Pedlar, C., Lewis, N.A. and Sampson, J.A., 2021. The Association Between Alterations in Redox Homeostasis, Cortisol, and Commonly Used Objective and Subjective Markers of Fatigue in American Collegiate Football. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 1(aop), pp.1-7. link

Tuesday, 22 June 2021

Dr. Giuseppe Zurlo wrote a post on Sally Brown's website on new teaching and assessment ideas in Mechanics, here's the link:https://sally-brown.net/kay-sambell-and-sally-brown-covid-19-assessment-collection/ Dr. Harold Berjamin gave a talk on “Nonlinear acceleration waves in soft porous tissues” at the 5th St. Andrews SofTMech Soft Tissue Modelling workshop (virtual). http://www.softmech.org/events/headline_791379_en.html Prof. Michel Destrade is applying for an SFI-EPSRC grant with Dr. Artur Gower from Sheffield University, let's wish them good luck! Prof. Michel Destrade was external examiner for a PhD thesis submitted to the National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan (Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics) PhD student Victoria Sanchez-Munoz will give a talk on "Nash Equilibria in certain two-choice multi-player games  played on the ladder graph" at the 8th. European Congress of Mathematics (Slovenia, 20-26 June 2021 - see 8ecm.si ) Two PhD students from Dr. Pilib's Ó Bróin's group will present at the upcoming joint Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology/European Conference On Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB 2021) virtual conference being held July 25th-30th. Barry Digby will present: 'nf-core/circrna: a nextflow workflow for the quantification, microRNA target prediction and differential expression analysis of circular RNAs in RNA-Seq data'. Sarah Ennis will present: 'Using single-cell transcriptomics to characterise the bone marrow microenvironment in health and leukemia'. Dr. Andrew Simpkin received €110,000 from the SFI Insight Platform Research fund for a four-year funded PhD student to work on modelling sensor data Research outputs Charamba B, Liew A, Coen E, Newell J, O’Brien T, Wijns W, Simpkin AJ, Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism (2021) https://doi.org/10.1002/edm2.263 Berjamin, H. “Nonlinear plane waves in saturated porous media with incompressible constituents”, Proc. R. Soc. A 477, 20210086 (2021). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspa.2021.0086 Madden, N., Stynes, M. A weighted and balanced FEM for singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion problems. Calcolo 58, 28 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10092-021-00421-w Hill, R., Madden N. Generating layer-adapted meshes using mesh partial differential equations. Numer. Math. Theor. Meth. Appl (2021) https://doc.global-sci.org/uploads/online_news/NMTMA/5460f2cb1545d59fcf41333daa0dbf90.pdf  

Friday, 21 May 2021

Victoria Sanchez-Munoz won best poster at our School Research Day for "Nash Equilibria in certain two-choice multi-player games played on the ladder graph".  Best runners up were:Róisín Hill for "Layer-adapted meshes generated using mesh PDEs" Lydia King for "Assessing the Role of Genomics Data in Stratifying Patients within Predictive Models for Breast Cancer Outcomes" Many congratulations and thanks again to all our students for their excellent posters Dr. Harold Berjamin gave a talk on “A hyperbolic framework for shear sound beams in nonlinear solids”, Elasticity Day 2021 (virtual), 21-22 April 2021, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge (UK) Mariel Barbachan e Silva and Pilib Ó Broin's paper: "Optimisation of cancer status prediction pipelines using bio-inspired computing" has been selected for oral presentation at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC2021). Beatrice Charamba gave a talk on her "Bayesian concurrent functional regression for sensor data" at the Conference on Applied Statistics in Ireland on May 13th. Dr. Pilib Ó Broin and Prof. Cathal Seoighe are part of a consortium that was successful in its application to the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund (DTIF) run by the Dept. of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. This is a €10.5m project involving new technologies, supported by machine learning, for the scalable development of personalized cancer immunotherapies. The DTIF will provide €6.8m in funding with €660k coming to the School.  Prof. John Newell was successful (along with PI Andrew Murphy) in the HRB Primary Care Clinical Trials Network call, securing funding of €999,979.75.  Dr. Pilib Ó Broin and his PhD student Barry Digby have been awarded an NUI Galway Open Educational Resources (OER) grant, receiving €3k (max available €3.5). Their project is entitled "Ensuring equality of access to STEM outreach material through the creation of a bilingual open educational resource for genomics data science”.  Dr. Emil Sköldberg, his PhD student Peter Phelan and collaborator Milo Orlich (Aalto University) have also been awarded an OER grant of €3k. Their project is entitled “An open textbook for algebraic coding theory”.  Dr. Giuseppe Zurlo will be Visiting Professor at Università La Sapienza, in Roma from May 24th to June 24th, delivering a 20hr PhD course on Nonlinear Elasticity and doing research with local hosting team Dr. Michael Hayes is promoting the Actuarial Careers and Hot Topics event on June 2nd from 2-3.30pm, see here for more details Prof. Michel Destrade gave a talk at a conference on "Engineered Materials for Sustainable Structures", Modena, Italy (online), 26-28 April Dr. Bharat Tripathi gave a talk on "Formation of Shear Shock waves in Human Head Phantom for Traumatic Brain Injury" in 6th Oxford International Neuron and Brain Mechanics Workshop (April 19-20, 2021), Oxford, UK (Oral) Dr. Andrew Simpkin is welcoming Sara Geremia from Università di Bologna, who won an Erasmus grant to travel and complete her MSc at our School  Research outputs King L, Flaus A, Holian E, Golden A. Survival outcomes are associated withgenomic instability in luminal breast cancers. PLoS One. 2021 Feb 3;16(2):e0245042. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0245042. PMID: 33534788 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0245042 Mitsuteru Nakamura*, Kenny Ye*, Mariel Barbachan e Silva*, Takahira Yamauchi, Daniel J. Hoeppner, Amir Fayyazuddin, Gina Kang, Emi A. Yuda, Masako Nagashima, Shingo Enomoto, Takeshi Hiramoto, Richard Sharp, Itaru Kaneko, Katsunori Tajinda, Megumi Adachi, Takuma Mihara, Shinichi Tokuno, Mark A. Geyer, Pilib Ó Broin, Mitsuyuki Matsumoto & Noboru Hiroi. Computational identification of variables in neonatal vocalizations predictive for postpubertal social behaviors in a mouse model of 16p11.2 deletion. Mol Psychiatry (2021). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01089-y

Tuesday, 20 April 2021

Dr. Simone Coughlan received a HRB-TMRN Summer Scholarship for a student to do an eight-week internship to review current approaches for returning genomics results to clinical trial participants Roberto Galizia successfully completed his PhD thesis on Thursday 15 April (supervisor: Petri Piiroinen) Dr. Hannah Conroy-Broderick is joining the school for two years as a postdoctoral fellow recruited with Dr. Stephan Rudykh's ERC funding Dr. Stephan Rudykh also recruited two PhD students: Andrei Cherkasov and Konstantin Kikinov  Dr. Bharat Tripathi gave a talk at ​the 6th Oxford International Neuron and Brain Mechanics Workshop 19-20 April Prof. Michel Destrade gave a talk and co-organised a mini-symposium at the Joint British Mathematical Colloquium (BMC) and British Applied Mathematics Colloquium (BAMC) 6-9 April Prof. Michel Destrade is one of the "Key International Talents" of the Chinese 111 Project on the Mechanics of Soft Matter. He will be funded to visit Zhejiang University over the next five years.   Research outputs Roshan, D., Joyce, K., Woulfe, P., Gorakati, P. R., Stock, R., & Sullivan, F. J. (2021). Live implant dosimetry may be an effective replacement for postimplant computed tomography in localized prostate cancer patients receiving low dose rate brachytherapy. Brachytherapy.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1538472121000453   Zaza D., Ciavarella M., Zurlo G., Strain incompatibility as a source of residual stress in welding and additive manufacturing, European Journal of Mechanics A/Solids, 85, (2021) 104147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euromechsol.2020.104147. Dolega M., Zurlo G., Le Goff M., Greda M., Verdier C., Joanny J.-F. , Cappello G., Recho P., Mechanical behavior of multi-cellular spheroids under osmotic compression, Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, 147 (2021) 104205,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmps.2020.104205. Saccomandi G., Speranzini E., Zurlo G., Piezoelectric Machines: Achieving Non-Standard Actuation and Sensing Properties in Poled Ceramics, The Quarterly Journal of Mechanics and Applied Mathematics, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/qjmam/hbab002 Nanda Poddar, Kajal Kumar Mondal and Niall Madden. Layer-adapted meshes for solute dispersion in a steady flow through an annulus with wall absorption: Application to a catheterized artery. Korea-Australia Rheology Journal 33, 11-24 (2021). DOI: 10.1007/s13367-021-0002-4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13367-021-0002-4 Thái Anh Nhan and Niall Madden. An analysis of diagonal and incomplete Cholesky preconditioners for singularly perturbed problems on layer-adapted meshes. J. Appl. Math. Comput. 65, 245-272 (2021). DOI: 10.1007/s12190-020-01390-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12190-020-01390-z   Connolly, Niall Patrick, Andrew Simpkin, Darren Mylotte,  et al. Impact on percutaneous coronary intervention for acute coronary syndromes during the COVID-19 outbreak in a non-overwhelmed European healthcare system: COVID-19 ACS-PCI experience in Ireland. BMJ open 11, no. 4 (2021): e045590.https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/11/4/e045590.abstract Bruinvels, Georgie, Esther Goldsmith, Richard Blagrove, Andrew Simpkin, Nathan Lewis, John Newell, et al. Prevalence and frequency of menstrual cycle symptoms are associated with availability to train and compete: a study of 6812 exercising women recruited using the Strava exercise app. British Journal of Sports Medicine 55, no. 8 (2021): 438-443. https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/bjsports/55/8/438.full.pdf?casa_token=ONYSQi1RcfEAAAAA:EGAFIin2T-QoOJHXN70FI7GFPCzWgwIRkiq527XI-lqq6GFgytQtX1KXa-SNNDa3TucE5rG3HLk Gibbons, Claire, Mouzzam Hussain, Derek T. O’Keeffe, and Andrew J. Simpkin. An analysis of patient self-reported COVID-19 symptoms during the first wave of the pandemic in Ireland. Irish Journal of Medical Science (1971-) (2021): 1-4.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11845-021-02598-z    

Friday, 16 April 2021

Congratulations to Shane Doyle, a fourth year B.Sc. Financial Mathematics & Economics student, who recently had a paper published in SIURO – SIAM Undergraduate Research Online with Dr. Petri Piiroininen as his sponsor. The work was carried out during his Summer Internship in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Maths in 2020.  SIAM Undergraduate Research Online - Volume 14  

Monday, 29 March 2021

Applications are invited for research bursaries intended for undergraduate students wishing to pursue a 4-6 week summer research project in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics, starting June 21st 2021. Each bursary has a value of 500 euro. These internship bursaries are available to undergraduate students of any nationality and university. Preference will be given to students in the penultimate year of their undergraduate studies. Eligible supervisors are listed under "Academic Staff" on the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics website. Candidates should make contact directly with a prospective supervisor to discuss a project and to arrange for the submission of the required recommendation by the prospective supervisor. Extended Application Deadline 5pm Friday 30th April 2021. Application Procedure To apply for a bursary, students should first find a supervisor within the school who is willing to supervise them for a 4-6 week summer project. The project should start on June 21st 2021, though the 4-6 week research period need not be continuous. Students should email a single pdf file to andrew.simpkin@nuigalway.ie containing: The name of the proposed project supervisor. A short description of the research project (200 words maximum). A table containing percentage grades for all university modules completed to date. Provisional results for Semester I of the current academic year should be included. Students should also ensure that the proposed supervisor sends a short letter of recommendation to andrew.simpkin@nuigalway.ie. There is no official application form. Evaluation Applications will be evaluated by members of the School's Research Committee. Students will be ranked based on their academic grades, the proposed research project and the supervisor's recommendation letter.

Tuesday, 16 March 2021

Dr. Stephan Rudykh is joining the School as Senior Lecturer in Applied Mathematics. He is bringing a € 2M ERC Starter grant to fund his research for the coming five years (a lab, 4 postdocs, 7 PhDs). Stephan has already recruited one postdoctoral fellow and two postgraduates who will start as soon as the logistics are sorted; Dr. Harold Berjamin won an Individual Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship (€ 185k). It will fund his research for 2021-2023; Prof. Michel Destrade joins 7 other participants in an upcoming Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (€ 3.7m) 2021-2025. He will recruit a PhD student; Dr. Bharat Tripathi and Dr. Valentina Balbi are advertising one College PhD Scholarship each, see attached files; Billy Ray started his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Mark Howard. Research outputs S. Coughlan, A. Das, E. O’Herlihy, F. Shanahan, P.W. O’Toole I.B. Jeffery. (2021) The gut virome in Irritable Bowel Syndrome differs from that of controls. Gut microbes.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2021.1887719 H. Berjamin, M. Destrade, W.J. Parnell. On the thermodynamic consistency of Quasi-Linear Viscoelastic models for soft solids. Mechanics Research Communications, 111 (2021) 103648.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093641320301762 B. Wu, M. Destrade. Wrinkling of soft magneto-active plates. International Journal of Solids and Structures, 208-209 (2021) 13-30.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020768320304054?dgcid=rss_sd_all Roshan D, Ferguson J, Pedlar CR, Simpkin A, Wyns W, Sullivan F, Newell, J. (2021) A comparison of methods to generate adaptive reference ranges in longitudinal monitoring. PloS ONE 16(2).https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247338#ack F. Xu, X.-Q. Feng, M. Destrade. Preface to the Special Issue on Instability and bifurcation in materials and structures. International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics, 129 (2021) 103663.https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/international-journal-of-non-linear-mechanics/special-issue/1089TRQ46GQ Y. Su, R.W. Ogden, M. Destrade. Bending control and instability of functionally graded dielectric elastomers. Extreme Mechanics Letters, 43 (2021) 101162.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352431620303114 Contessotto P, Orbanić D, Da Costa M, Jin C, Owens P, Chantepie S, Chinello C, Newell J, Magni F, Papy-Garcia D, Karlsson NG, Kilcoyne M, Dockery P, Rodríguez-Cabello JC, Pandit A. Elastin-like recombinamers-based hydrogel modulates post-ischemic remodeling in a non-transmural myocardial infarction in sheep. Sci Transl Med. 2021 Feb 17;13(581):eaaz5380. doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaz5380. PMID: 33597263.https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/13/581/eaaz5380 Sheill G, Guinan E, O'Neill L , Newell J, et al. Prehabilitation during a pandemic: preoperative exercise to improve fitness in patients undergoing complex surgery for cancer of the lung or oesophagus, the PRE-HIIT trial: an updated study protocol [version 1; peer review: 1 approved with reservations]. HRB Open Res 2021, 4:4https://doi.org/10.12688/hrbopenres.13198.1 Barrett, S., Simpkin, A. J., Walls, G. M., Leech, M., & Marignol, L. (2021). Geometric and Dosimetric Evaluation of a Commercially Available Auto-segmentation Tool for Gross Tumour Volume Delineation in Locally Advanced Non-small Cell Lung Cancer: a Feasibility Study. Clinical Oncology, 33(3), 155-162.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0936655520303095 Wade, K. H., Clifford, L., Simpkin, A. J., Beynon, R., Birch, L., Northstone, K., Timpson, N. J. (2021). Piloting the objective measurement of eating weight and speed at a population scale: a nested study within the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Wellcome Open Research, 5, 185.http://wellcomeopenresearch.s3.amazonaws.com/manuscripts/18248/20961e6c-b486-4e23-bb0f-d955d1ec9227_16091_-_kaitlin_wade_v2.pdf Mulder, R. H., Neumann, A., Cecil, C. A., Walton, E., Houtepen, L. C., Simpkin, A. J., Suderman, M. (2021). Epigenome-wide change and variation in DNA methylation in childhood: Trajectories from birth to late adolescence. Human Molecular Genetics. https://academic.oup.com/hmg/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hmg/ddaa280/6101449?login=true FC Barcelona Innovation Hub Conference: Analytics in Sports Tomorrow – Research papers winnersPredicting and Individualising Training Load using historical GPS data in Elite Soccer. Dr. Kenny McMillan, Dr. Andrew Simpkin, Dr. Brian Moore, Prof. John Newellhttps://sportstomorrow.fcbarcelona.com/speakers/    

Friday, 29 May 2020

Dr Martin Kerin, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics, has had a research article published in the Annals of Mathematics, widely regarded as the top journal for pure mathematics in the world. The article, written in collaboration with Professor Sebastian Goette of the University of Freiburg and Professor Krishnan Shankar of the University of Oklahoma, resolves a question first asked around 60 years ago on the geometrical properties of seven-dimensional objects which very closely resemble spheres.