Our News
Research Team of the Year award for Professor John Atkins and Dr Pasha Baranov
Professor John Atkins, SFI Research Professor in our School, and Dr Pasha Baranov, College Lecturer in our School, received the Research Team of the Year Award from the President, Dr Michael Murphy, at the University Staff Awards ceremony held in the Aula Maxima on Thursday 9th October last.
The award was given in recognition of their collaborative efforts in the highly-competitive field of RNA Recoding. The awards are sponsored by Gilead Sciences Ireland UC, a BioPharma company based in Carrigtwohill, Co Cork.
John and Pasha’s collaboration started in 1999 at the Human Genetics School, University of Utah, where Pasha’s bioinformatics approaches productively complemented John’s research. The award citation read by Professor Anita Maguire, Vice President for Research, noted that the Recoding Research Team have been extraordinarily productive with 46 publications over the last three years in top journals including Science, Nature and PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). John was a lead editor on RNA Worlds, a seminal text launched by Nobel Laureate Dr. James Watson at UCC. The Recoding Research Team has enjoyed sustained funding success with 7 grant awards from SFI and a major grant from the Wellcome Trust.
Student wins UCC Strategic Research Award
At the same awards ceremony, Mr Dylan O’Donovan (BSc Biomedical Science) of this School received a UCC Strategic Research Award of a PhD studentship under the supervision of Professor Mary McCaffrey for a project entitled, “An investigation of the MAP kinase phosphorylation of the GRAB protein and functional consequences thereof on its binding to Rab11 and Rab8 and muscle cell physiology”.