Research News

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)