image: Dr Aisling Ní Annaidh is pictured at UCD School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering with a planar biaxial tensile tester, which is helping her team to advance understanding of the mechanics of tissue.
Credit: Vincent Hoban
3 December 2024: Five University College Dublin (UCD) academics have been announced as recipients of prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grants.
The UCD awardees will each receive €2 million for their projects spanning Law, Philosophy, Biomechanical Engineering and Information and Communication Studies. With a total value of €10 million, this is the highest number of ERC Consolidator Grants awarded to an Irish university in any one call.
These grants recognise outstanding scientists and scholars as they establish independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas. The UCD recipients are Associate Professor Ruth Boeker, Professor Cathryn Costello, Dr Maebh Harding, Dr Lai Ma and Associate Professor Aisling Ní Annaidh.
The ERC announced a total of €678 million to fund 328 researchers in this round, as part of the Horizon Europe programme. 62% of the ERC grants awarded to UCD academics under Horizon Europe have gone to female researchers.
Professor Kate Robson Brown, UCD Vice-President for Research, Innovation and Impact, said, “Congratulations to the five UCD academics who have been recognised as pioneers in their fields through these awards. Their success in this highly competitive call reflects the breadth of expertise across disciplines at UCD and the quality of world-class research being carried out here."
Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council, said: “Congratulations to all the researchers who have won ERC Consolidator Grants in this latest round for the mid- career stage. Whilst we had the funds available to back more applicants this year than in 2023, the fact remains that many applicants who were rated as excellent in this competition will still not be funded due to lack of budget. This waste of talent can only be tackled by increasing the investment in blue-sky research in Europe.”
Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, said: “One of my key priorities is to ensure Europe is a global leader in research and innovation. It can only be achieved by retaining and attracting top talent such as today’s laureates of ERC Consolidator Grants. It is my mission to expand the ERC which will help strengthen Europe’s competitiveness and foster ground-breaking discoveries and solutions to the challenges we face”.
The UCD Projects
BMoral: New Histories of British Moral Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (c.1690–1800)
Principal Investigator (PI): Associate Professor Ruth Boeker, UCD School of Philosophy
Women have been largely excluded and marginalised in histories of 18th-century British moral philosophy. While there is growing interest in women philosophers, the existing research often focuses on individual figures. BMoral moves beyond this and analyses intellectual networks with the goal of gaining a deeper understanding of how male and female philosophers interacted and influenced each other’s writings.
The project will offer unprecedented opportunities to assess the extent of women’s distinct contributions to British moral philosophy and to recover neglected themes in 18th-century moral writings.
Associate Professor Ruth Boeker said, "BMoral aims to fundamentally rethink existing narratives about 18th century British moral philosophy. We have overwhelming evidence that women actively participated in moral debates during that period. Many were concerned with philosophical and moral questions that play a role in everyday life such as education, mastery of emotions, love, or friendship. Their views have not yet received sufficient attention in existing studies on British moral philosophy."
She added, “BMoral intends to change this by bringing together computational and traditional philosophical methods. This innovative approach makes it possible to analyse a large corpus of 18th-century writings and to examine the social and intellectual networks in which male and female philosophers interacted, with the potential not only to change the focus of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy, but also to transform the history of philosophy more broadly."
RefLex: Is International Refugee Law Effective?
PI: Professor Cathryn Costello, UCD Sutherland School of Law
RefLex entails a global comparative study of the workings and effectiveness of International Refugee Law (IRL), a body of international law that is implemented, domesticated and judicialised to varying degrees across the world.
While there are many studies on the effectiveness of International Human Rights Law and the impact of human rights courts and other bodies, there are no large-n mixed methods comparative studies of International Refugee Law (IRL) in practice.
RefLex will fill this huge knowledge gap, developing a new dataset - the Refugee Protection Index - to explore under what conditions IRL is effective in delivering protection for refugees. It will also contribute to the burgeoning field of legal mobilisation studies, examining legal mobilisation from below (by refugees and their allies) and from above (by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).
Professor Cathryn Costello said, “RefLex aims to provide vital insights at a time when the global refugee regime is increasingly adrift from International Law. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with two scholars I admire immensely – Professors Lamis Abdelaaty (Syracuse University, USA) and Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen’s University, Canada) – and to build a new research team to work at the cutting edge of research on international law and politics.”
REDEFPARENT: Redefining Legal Parenthood as a Legal Interdependency between Parent and Child
PI: Assistant Professor Maebh Harding, UCD Sutherland School of Law
The legal rules that govern the relationship between parent and child have undergone incremental change in response to assisted reproductive technology and human rights challenges but are inadequate to reflect the complexity of modern family life. The package of legal recognition, rights and obligations connected to legal parenthood has fragmented and in situations like surrogacy, social parent and illegal adoption, children’s rights can be compromised.
REDEFPARENT provides a new way to think about the legal nexus between parent and child as a two-way legal interdependency. This new legal conceptualisation will reflect the interests of both parents and children and recognise that obligations and vulnerabilities fluctuate over the life course.
Reassessing the very basis of family law, the project will interrogate the historical, legal and social dimensions of legal parenthood in Ireland, England and Wales, Sweden and Poland to expose the gaps between the regulatory work that the concept of legal parenthood is currently doing and the social expectations that are placed on the concept.
Dr Maebh Harding said, “This new way of thinking will be groundbreaking to how we understand the obligations and vulnerabilities of family life. REDEFPARENT is a hugely significant and timely project that allows us to properly assess the real-life effect of legal regulation on family function and personal identity and frame new, more inclusive regulatory models.”
SCRiBe: Sustainable and Collaborative Research Information for Bibliodiverse Ecosystems: A Transnational Study
PI: Assistant Professor Lai Ma, UCD School of Information and Communication Studies
Open Research refers to the various movements and practices that aim to make scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone. SCRiBe will critically examine the conceptualisation of ‘open’ in the open access movement, as well as boundaries, limitations, and exceptions in the development of open research infrastructure since the late 1990s.
By exploring the development of open research infrastructure from a transnational perspective, this project aims to identify the constraints that hinder the growth of bibliodiversity in three different geographical regions: Europe, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr Lai Ma said, “This project will shed light on an overlooked research area in knowledge production, providing new perspectives to improve understanding of the global inequities of knowledge production.
"By investigating the relationship between standards, geopolitics and transnational knowledge flows, we will identify the boundaries and regulations that create obstacles to bibliodiversity. SCRiBe will expand the horizon of the study of global knowledge production, towards developing more sustainable, collaborative, and equitable research ecosystems.”
BreastRecon: A patient specific approach to tissue expansion in breast Reconstruction
PI: Associate Professor Aisling Ní Annaidh, UCD School of Mechanical & Materials Engineering
Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer globally, affecting 13% of women in their lifetime.
For women who undergo a mastectomy, breast reconstruction has become an integral part of their treatment. However, the most common procedure - two stage implant-based reconstruction - is associated with high complication rates and low patient satisfaction.
These reconstructions involve the insertion of a tissue expander and silicone implants which are gradually inflated below the skin over several weeks to induce new skin growth. Growing new tissue and predicting its future behaviour presents unique challenges, and a current lack of techniques to evaluate and predict the amount of tissue growth is an obstacle to effective surgical planning.
BreastRecon aims to advance patient-specific breast reconstructions by developing a novel acoustoelastic method which can non-invasively determine key biomechanical parameters.
Associate Professor Aisling Ní Annaidh said, “This project will initially develop a tool to monitor tissue growth in vivo, offering valuable fundamental insights into growth and remodelling processes. Using this new methodology, BreastRecon will ultimately advance patient-specific tissue expansions by designing optimum surgical protocols, offering a disruptive breakthrough in reconstructive surgeries.
For more details and a full list of awardees, visit the ERC website.