Meet Niall Kelly, who joined UCC Academy’s Project Centre in 2023. Since then, he has worked on a variety of projects at UCC. Niall has a gorgeous black labrador named Lexie, who he loves to walk in the countryside with.

Read on to learn more about Niall and his work at UCC Academy.

Rebecca Buckley works in research project management as a Programme Manager within UCC Academy's Project Centre. She loves the variety her job brings in supporting researchers to achieve their project goals.

Outside of work, Rebecca enjoys reading and spending time with family and friends, and she has a passport with enviable stamps from across the globe!

In this series, we shine a light on our colleagues at UCC Academy and the work they do along with some of their own interests.

Shauna Crowley has been a Business Administrator with the IO Team (International Office) at UCC Academy since 2019. She works in Cork and interacts with people from across the world. Shauna loves to travel; she has a connection with Quinlan’s Seafood Bar on Oliver Plunkett Street and once met an incredibly famous sports star.

Jen Doran, Communications Project Officer, works with IGNITE, an incubation programme for founders working full-time on their start-up. The programme is open to recent graduates in any discipline from any third level institution in Ireland. Jen who is from Texas, USA came to Ireland to work and live. We recently caught up with Jen to ask her more about her work and what she likes about Cork and Ireland.

A group of finance staff from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, visited University College Cork in June, and we were excited to meet with them to discuss the inner workings of UCC Academy! 

UCC Academy Project Manager attended the UN Climate Change Summit (COP27) at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November on behalf of the Smart Protein Project.

In a world of tightening marketing budgets, how can businesses create video content that immediately speaks to existing clients, wins the attention of new customers and delivers sales?

Nicole McDonagh, Conference and Video Lead at UCC Academy, explains how businesses can leverage relatively inexpensive phones and apps to promote their brands and products in a marketplace full of distraction.

Orla Egan has been an instrumental figure in telling the story of LGBT lives in Cork. As well as establishing the Cork LGBT Archive, she has written a book, the Queer Republic of Cork, Cork’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Communities 1970s-1990s. She has also written a play and directed a documentary on the subject. It has been a labour of love driven by her passion to raise awareness of queer lives in Cork.

UCC Rugby will celebrate a significant milestone in its history later this year, as it marks 150 years in existence. The club has not only left its mark on the pitch over that 150 years but also contributed something else of huge significance to the University, originating the distinctive skull and crossbones which later came to represent UCC Sport overall. The rugby club was founded in 1872 by medical faculty staff and students, with the skull and crossbones as a fitting emblem.

UCC Academy has donated €200 to Cork Simon Community after 14 members of staff walked, cycled and ran 2,344 kilometres throughout August as part of a Distance Challenge organised by Ian Dooley and members of the company’s Sports and Social Committee.

Is there a more ironic question than “any comments or feedback?”. Despite being specifically designed to illicit a response, all too often it is met by the kind of silence that left Paul Simon wondering about people’s inability to communicate.

Given that there are so many different ways of communicating, and a corresponding number of ways of misunderstanding or misrepresenting each other, conveying our ideas, thoughts and opinions can be difficult at times.

The project aims to develop innovative materials to convert waste heat into electricity.

Maggie Cardosi, UCC's North American Representative based in New York, shares her experience of remote working.

With Ireland's vaccine roll-out underway and due to ramp-up in the months ahead, we can begin to hope that "the end is truly in sight."  

 Over the next two quarters, businesses will begin to plan for a gradula re-opening of the economy and return to the offices they left behind in March 2020. 

Research has shown that we make distinct judgements about people based on their writing, irrespective of the platform or communication channel.

A University College Cork-led research project has received €3.2m in European funding to develop a more cost effective way to measure air pollution.

It is hoped that the research team, drawn from industry and academia and coordinated by UCC, will bring about the creation of low cost electrical sensors for detecting harmful particles in the atmosphere, and that these devices can be subsequently deployed on airplanes, ships and other platforms to monitor air quality.

For many people, compiling reports and collating data can be a task that lingers until such time as deadlines approach. 

Check out the great work from our project team supporting Cork Discovers.

As remote working extends from the short to the medium term, online platforms are increasingly important. And for those that moved overnight to working in the cloud, the learning curve was particularly steep.

UCC Academy’s most recent Community of Project Managers event saw Eoin Hahessy, Head of Media and PR at UCC, Michael Tobin from the University’s Audio Visual Media Services unit, and Judie Russell, Communications Project Manager with UCC Academy, discuss the importance of communications in a socially distant world.

EU Project Manager and Nutritionist Jackie Lyons shares tips on remote working as part of our Bite-Size learning series. 

UCC Academy considers holistic staff supports and makes plans to return as a paperless office

Hear from members of our project management team in this podcast from UCC Academy.