Research 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.
• 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