The Boyle Medal is a celebration of the famous Irish scientists of the past and the quality of the their work today. Dick Ahlstrom reports.
Five scientists, two each from Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin and one with links to University College Cork, have been short-listed for the 2003 Boyle Medal award for scientific research excellence.
The distinction includes a €40,000 academic bursary co-funded by the Royal Dublin Society and by The Irish Times.
The five came through a preliminary selection process involving a panel of judges that included scientific peers from a number of Irish third-level institutions. The short-listed candidates will now go forward for a second judging round this autumn, a process that includes interviews conducted by a panel of international scientists.
The Boyle Medal was devised by the RDS and first presented in 1899 to mark "scientific research of exceptional merit carried out in Ireland". Since then, 33 Boyle Medals have been presented to some of Ireland's greatest scientific thinkers.
The bursary is a new innovation, first introduced in 1999 to mark the medal's centenary year and the first involvement of The Irish Times in the award programme. The bursary supports the cost of maintaining a graduate in a three-year PhD programme. The graduate is selected by the Boyle Medal winner and will complete his or her PhD degree within the research group of the winning scientist. In this way the student will benefit from working beside an acknowledged leader in Irish scientific research.
The five finalists selected during the initial round include some of Ireland's best, all of whom are carrying out world-class research.
Under the Boyle Medal rules the judges can select a maximum of five candidates and it is a measure of the quality of this year's entries that a full compliment of five candidates was finally short-listed.
The candidates are: Prof John Atkins, former director of biotechnology at Science Foundation Ireland, a post he has recently left in order to pursue research activities at University College Cork; Prof Michael Finnis, head of the Theory and Simulation of Liquids and Solids research group at Queens University Belfast; Prof John McCanny, professor of microelectronics engineering at Queen's University Belfast; Prof Seamus Martin, Smurfit Professor of Medical Genetics at Trinity College Dublin; and Prof Luke O'Neill, director of the biotechnology institute at Trinity College Dublin.
A smaller group of internationally recognised scientists based outside of Ireland will now be assembled for the final judging round scheduled to take place next autumn. Its composition will reflect the specialised research pursued by the five short-listed candidates.
The Boyle Medal award and bursary highlight the commitment of both The Irish Times and the Royal Dublin Society to support the important work done by Irish scientists.
It is a celebration of the famous Irish scientists of the past including its namesake Sir Robert Boyle, but more importantly a celebration of the quality work being done today Irish scientists.
The judging panel for this first round selection of shortlisted candidates included: Prof Dervilla Donnelly (chairwoman), Prof Frank Imbusch, Prof Patrick Cunningham, Prof Derek Boyd, Dick Ahlstrom, Prof Sally McClean, Prof Mark Bailey and Prof Brian Harvey.
John F Atkins has done ground-breaking work in human genetics, making major contributions to our understanding of gene expression. In particular he has delved into the "RNA world", looking at how this molecule can re-programme gene expression, but also how early primitive organisms may well have depended on RNA rather than DNA replication.
Atkins was born in Co Cork and completed his PhD in Trinity College Dublin. Until recently he was the director of biology and biotechnology research activities funded under the Science Foundation Ireland support programme. He left this directorship in order to return to research, hoping to attract funding and take up a post at University College Cork.
Prior to his involvement in SFI, he was research associate professor and then research professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah. He has also worked at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, lectured for a time at UCC, worked at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory when headed by the co-discoverer of DNA's double helix, Prof James Watson, and at the University of Edinburgh.
He is co-editor of a book, RNA World, with collaborator, Prof Ray Gesteland, and its soon-to-be-published second edition will include contributions from six Nobel laureates.
Michael Finnis has for years led international research into the interaction of materials at an atomic level. In particular he has made considerable advances in the theory and practice of atomic-scale modelling, explaining interatomic forces in a wide range of materials.
Born in England, Finnis did his PhD with the theory of condensed matter group in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He is currently professor in the atomistic theory of materials and is also head of research in "Theory and Simulation of Liquids and Solids" at Queen's University Belfast.
He has worked as leader of the theory group at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart and at the Fritz-Haber Institute in Berlin.
Much of the work done by Finnis has had an impact on world science. One class of models that predicts the interatomic force in transition metals has come to be known as a "Finnis-Sinclair Potential". Another that calculates surface energies of contracted atoms is now known as the "Finnis contraction".
His work makes an important contribution to research associated with nanotechnology given his focus on surface and intersurface thermodynamics. He also studies the effect of oxygen and other environmental gases on the structure and energy of surfaces and interfaces.
John McCanny is a specialist in signal processing and the Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits used for this purpose. He has helped to pioneer this field and more recently has moved into novel circuit architecture and chip designs for data encryption and decryption.
He completed his PhD in physics at the University of Ulster and is currently professor of microelectronics and engineering at Queen's University Belfast. He has an exceptional list of awards and fellowships.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, holds an IEEE millennium medal and a medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was awarded a CBE in 2002 for "contributions to engineering and higher education" and is also a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in the US.
Many aspects of his research have commercial potential. He is co-founder and a director of Audio Processing Technology Ltd, which produces hifi audio compression products and audio signal processing algorithms used in DVD systems worldwide.
Should he win the Boyle Medal he would use the bursary to fund a PhD researcher in data encryption over the Internet and wireless networks. A particular focus would be on encryption methodologies that rely on a hardware solution given his expertise in chip design.
Seamus Martin has made an outstanding contribution to our understanding of apoptosis or programmed cell death. Studies in this area have focused on its involvement in inflammation and cancer. He has received substantial research funding through two Wellcome Trust fellowships and more recently with a large Science Foundation Ireland research award.
Martin was born in Dublin and did his PhD at NUI Maynooth. He is currently Smurfit professor of medical genetics at Trinity College Dublin and director of the molecular cell biology laboratory there.
He has worked at NUI Maynooth, at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology in the US and at the University of California, San Diego, and as a research fellow at University College London.
His primary focus is on the cellular machinery that orchestrates the natural cell death. Understanding apoptosis should lead to new ways to treat illnesses.
Martin developed an important cell labelling methodology that has become the standard technique for detecting apoptotic cells. More recent work has included a precise ordering of the biochemical steps that take place during apoptosis.
He ranks as one of Ireland's most cited researchers, with an analysis of more than 82,000, placing him within the top 10 authors worldwide in terms of total research citations.
Luke O'Neill has made significant advances in our understanding of the biochemical processes involved in inflammation. His efforts have helped explain the underlying molecular basis for chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and the immune response to infection.
He received a PhD in pharmacology from the University of London and is currently the co-director of the centre for immunology and the director of the biotechnology institute at Trinity College Dublin. He has organised eight international meetings in the past decade and was a plenary speaker at more than 50 international meetings.
O'Neill is a world authority in the area of signal transduction by pro-inflammatory cytokines, the messaging molecules that launch the inflammatory process. He has done pioneering work in interleukin-1 cytokine has completed extensive studies of another protein important to the inflammatory process, necrosis factor-kapabeta. This is the master switch of gene transcription during immunity.
He has raised research funding worth €7.9million over the past 10 years in support of his work and is the joint holder of three patents based on research discoveries. He has also received awards including the Conway medal for biomedical research and the Royal Irish Academy medal for biochemistry.