Research Day 2018 concluded with two awards ceremonies that took place in the O’Flanagan Lecture Theatre on Thursday, 7 March. Professor Catherine Greene, the event’s Academic Coordinator, hosted the Research Day Awards Ceremony which recognised winners across fourteen categories. Earlier in the afternoon, the CEO Innovation Awards were introduced by Dr Seamus Browne, Head of Industry Partnerships, RCSI with awards presented to the winners by Professor Ray Stallings, Director of Research and Innovation, RCSI.
The main ceremony began with the RCSI Author Citations Prizes presented by Grainne McDonagh, Office of Institutional Research and Planning. The first award went to Professor Susan Smith, Department of General Practice for the Most Highly Cited RCSI Senior Authored Paper 2012 for her paper ‘Managing patients with multimorbidity: Systematic review of interventions in primary care and community settings’. The prize for the Most Highly Cited RCSI Senior Authored Paper with International Collaboration 2012-2016 went to Dr Chris Thompson, Department of Medicine for his paper ‘Diagnosis, evaluation, and treatment of hyponatremia: Expert panel recommendations’. The prize for the Most Highly Cited RCSI Senior Authored Paper with Industry Collaboration 2012-2016 was awarded to Dr Joan Ni Gabhann, Departments of Opthamology and Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics for her paper ‘Btk regulates macrophage polarization in response to lipopolysaccharide’. The final publication prize for Most Highly Downloaded Original Research Paper from the RCSI Repository in 2017, went to Dr Michael Gilmartin, Department of Medicine for his paper ‘Epidemiology of diabetes and complications among adults in the Republic of Ireland 1998-2015: a systematic review and meta-analysis.’
This year’s Health Professions Education Award, presented by Professor Ray Stallings, was awarded to John Hayden, School of Pharmacy for his poster ‘An exploration of how a simulated adherence exercise may increase empathy in undergraduate pharmacy students’. The prize for the Front Cover Illustration for the Research Day 2018 Abstract book went to Brenton Cavanagh, Research Engineer (Microscopy), RCSI Research Institute for his image depicting FITC crystals a derivative of fluorescein used in a wide array of fluorescent imaging probes.
In the poster presentation categories, the best Undergraduate poster prize was awarded to Anas Zeidan, medical student from RCSI Bahrain for his poster ‘Realistic modeling and simulation of the human knee joint movement incorporating the realistic axes of rotations’. In the Postgraduate Scholars first year only category, the winner was Catherine Sirafim, Department of Anatomy for her poster ‘On-demand delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics for temporally controlled treatment of diabetic foot ulcers’. The prize for the best poster in the Postgraduate Scholars second year or later category, was awarded to Alessandra Di Grande, Department of Physiology and Medical Physics for her poster ‘Determining how distinct microenvironments alter BCL-2 family dependence in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia’. In the Early Career Investigators category, the best poster award went to Dr Catríona Dowling, Department of Physiology and Medical Physics for her poster ‘Discovery of a novel histone deacetylase 6 inhibitor that kills drug-resistant breast cancer’.
In the oral presentations categories the Dr. Harry O’Flanagan Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Research was awarded to medical student Melissa M. Gabriel for her presentation ‘Impact of Universal Newborn Hearing Screening (UNHS) on Cochlear Implanted Children in Ireland’. The Dr Harry O’Flanagan Prize is a silver College medal, generously supported by Dr Yacoob Kadwa, RCSI graduate (Class of 1965) to pay special tribute to the memory of Dr Harry O’Flanagan, former Registrar of RCSI. The prize for the best postgraduate oral presentation, sponsored by Bio-Sciences Limited, was jointly awarded to Rebecca Watkin, Department of Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics, for her presentation ‘S. aureus induced miR330-3p expression triggers abnormal permeability in an ex-vivo 2D model of sepsis’ and Edmund Gilbert, also from the Department of Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics for his presentation ‘The Irish DNA Atlas: Revealing Fine-Scale Population Structure and History within Ireland.’
The last award of the day was The Barnes Medal, for the best oral presentation by an Early Career Investigator which was awarded to Dr Emir Bozkurt, Department of Physiology and Medical Physics for his presentation ‘TRAIL promotes entosis through Caspase-8’. The Barnes medal pays tribute to Dr Joe Barnes, Professor Emeritus of Tropical Medicine in RCSI, a founding member of ICROSS (International Community for the Relief of Starvation and Suffering), an international charity fighting poverty and disease. The award was presented by Matthew Barnes, son of Dr Joe Barnes.
Earlier in the afternoon, as part of 2017 CEO Innovation Awards, presented by Professor Cathal Kelly, Chief Executive/ Register, the winners of the Invention Disclosure Awards were unveiled as: Reece Kenny, Department of Pharmaceutical & Medicinal Chemistry; Dr Irene Mencia Castano, Department of Anatomy; and Helen Coughlan, Department of Psychiatry, RCSI. Professor David Henshall, Professor of Molecular Physiology and Neuroscience, and Professor Leonie Young, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, were recognised as US Patent Awardees.
Professor James O’Donnell, Director of the Irish Centre for Vascular Biology was announced as winner of the Clinician Award 2017; Professor Leonie Young, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, was presented with the Commercialisation Award 2017 and Professor Andreas Heise, Associate Professor of Chemistry, was recipient of the Industry Engagement Award 2017.
Also presented yesterday were the inaugural RCSI International Secondment Awards presented by Dr Anthony Chubb, Manager, School of Postgraduate Studies. The awardees were Robert Murphy, Fergal O’Shaughnessy, Camille Hurley, Edmund Gilbert, Orla O’Carroll, Conor Duffy and Brandon Chalazan.
Congratulations to all the winners and to the Coordinators of Research Day 2018: Professor Catherine Greene (Academic Coordinator), Dr Christopher Byrne, Cathy O’Byrne and Kevin Lynch, on the success of Research Day 2018.