Dec 17 2008
Three new CSETs announced
Fresh from an awards announcement: three new CSETs, the centres for science, engineering and technology that form a cornerstone of Science Foundation Ireland and government policy for developing R&D capacity, were announced this morning and a deserving bunch they are too. I’ve spoken to and written about all these organisations in recent times and they are doing cutting edge, internationally recognised work so congrats to all. Most recently, I interviewed the very amiable Prof Fergus Shanahan at Cork for a feature in the US magazine The Scientist a few months back. DERI’s semantic web work under Stefan Decker is fascinating stuff. And any organisation that can produce talks (and fridge magnets!) on the theme, “Just say Nano”, as CRANN did a while back — well, gotta love that!
The five-year funding awards under the SFI CSET Programme announced today are for:
(1) Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) based at University College Cork which is focusing on research in gastrointestinal health;
Director: Prof. Fergus Shanahan
Industry Partners:Â GlaxoSmithKline and Alimentary Health.
Other Partners: Teagasc(2) CRANN, the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices which is hosted by Trinity College Dublin and is working in the area of Nanotechnology;
Director: Prof. John Boland
Industry Partners: Hewlett-Packard and Intel(3) DERI, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, based at NUI Galway where the team are researching technologies that will underpin the next generation of the World Wide Web – the Semantic Web.
Director: Prof. Stefan Decker
Industry Partners: Nortel Networks (Ireland) Ltd, Cisco Systems Internetworking (Ireland) Ltd., FISC-Ireland Ltd, L M Ericsson Ltd. Storm Technology Ltd., Celtrak Ltd, Cyntelix Corporation Ltd, OpenLink Software (UK) Ltd
3 responses so far
I have some concerns here about the public perception of national priorities, and how SFI might do a lot more to allay them: I wrote them up this evening at http://chrishornat.blogspot.com/2008/12/accident-and-emergency-beds-or.html
best
Chris
The government decisions to continue funding R&D in Ireland are some of the very few good decisions that it has made recently. I hope this continues, because a cut in this type of funding would probably not upset the average person.
Actually, Karlin, these are (were) not new CSETs, but rather new funding streams for existing CSETS.