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UCC scholarship recognised as four academics elected to Royal Irish Academy
Four senior academics from University College Cork (UCC) have been elected to the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), the highest academic honour in Ireland.
The RIA today celebrated Admittance Day, when 29 newly elected members were officially admitted to the Academy today for their exceptional contributions to the sciences, humanities, and social science, as well as to public service. Members are elected by their peers in recognition of outstanding scholarly achievement and their contribution to knowledge and society.
The Academy has been honouring Ireland’s leading contributors to the world of learning since its establishment in 1785. There are 707 Members of the Royal Irish Academy, of whom 97 are Honorary or oversees members. Past members have included Maria Edgeworth, a pioneer of the modern novel, Kathleen Lonsdale, X-ray crystallographer and pacifist, and Nobel laureates: WB Yeats; Ernest Walton, and Seamus Heaney.
The UCC academics newly elected to the RIA are Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir, Professor Des MacHale, Professor Rosemary O’Connor and Professor Kevin Murray. Their elections to the RIA bring the number of UCC academics in the RIA to 59.
Brian Ó Gallachóir is Professor of Sustainability at UCC and Director of the Sustainability Institute, overseeing the strategic direction of 480 sustainability researchers in UCC. He is also Associate Vice-President of Sustainability, consolidating UCC's role as an internationally leading university of sustainability. Brian is an internationally recognised research leader in energy systems modelling, which he established as a new research field in Ireland over the past twenty years.
Brian was elected Chair of the International Energy Agency Energy Technology Systems Analysis Programme (IEA ETSAP) in 2011 and has been re-elected annually since then. He has also been highly successful in achieving policy impact from his research, underpinning many of Ireland’s key energy and climate policies over the past 10 years. Brian has also led research into the societal dimensions of climate action and received the inaugural SFI Engaged Research Award 2022 and the inaugural Irish Times Positive Impacts Award in 2024.
Speaking about his election, Professor Ó Gallachóir said: "I feel very honoured and privileged to be elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy. I look forward to supporting the Academy in using research evidence to shape and contribute to policy debates in the area of sustainability and to explore how the Academy can further advance engaged research as a real opportunity for increasing public participation in research on an All-Island basis."
Des MacHale is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at University College Cork, where he taught for forty years. He graduated from University College Galway in 1968 with B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mathematical Science and took a Ph.D. degree in Algebra at the University of Keele in the United Kingdom under the direction of Dr. Hans Liebeck.
His research interests lie in Group Theory and Ring Theory to which he has made significant contributions in the areas of automorphisms and commutativity, but he is also interested in Euclidean Geometry, Trigonometry, Number Theory and Geometric Dissections. He has published some 140 research papers in refereed journals. He has also written over a hundred books on diverse subjects such as George Boole (4), John Ford's movie The Quiet Man (4), Mathematical Puzzles and Problems (6), Mathematical Humour, and many books of Wit and Jokes. He is currently working on a book on Beauty in Mathematics.
Commenting on his appointment to the RIA, Professor MacHale said: "Election to the RIA is the icing on the cake of my academic career, and I am deeply honoured to have been chosen. My fond hope is that the collective skills and intelligence of the members can contribute to solving some of the world's great problems such as war, hunger and global warming. I believe that Mathematics, being the historical home of rationality, strategy and logic, has an important part to play in such solutions."
Rosemary O’Connor is Professor of Cell Biology in the School of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at UCC since 2007 and a member of the Department since 1997. She is internationally recognised for translational cancer research and fundamental discoveries on how growth factors affect cancer and other major diseases. Her work on cell signalling continues to shape our understanding of metabolism, inflammation and cancer. She has worked in industry and academia, assembled a long-term worldwide network of expert collaborators, published high profile articles, and received funding from national and international agencies, including five successive Science Foundation Ireland/Research Ireland Investigator Awards. In addition to leadership roles in research societies and conferences she has served two terms as Head of School and has supervised more than 40 PhD students.
Speaking about her admittance to the RIA, Professor O’Connor said: "I am honoured to have been elected to the RIA and would like to work through the RIA to support areas of All-Island life sciences, research, and also highlight the importance of maintaining our capacity for cutting-edge laboratory-based enquiry."
Professor Kevin Murray and Professor Daniel Carey, President of the Royal Irish Academy.
Kevin Murray is Professor in Roinn na Sean- agus na Meán-Ghaeilge, UCC, and was Head of Scoil Léann na Gaeilge from 2020-2026. His research interests include placenames, the Finn Cycle, editing medieval Irish texts and medieval Irish legal materials. He has produced over 100 publications, including three monographs as well as co-authoring nine volumes of Foclóir Stairiúil Áintainmneacha na Gaeilge. He has been Vice-President of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society since 2007 and Honorary Secretary of the Irish Texts Society since 2021.
He is one of the editors of the Locus project, the aim of which is to create a new Historical Dictionary of Gaelic Placenames to replace Fr Edmund Hogan's Onomasticon Goedelicum. He is currently co-PI on the Taighde Éireann project 'The Disappearing Text', focussed on producing editions of the earliest version of Acallam na Senórach 'The Colloquy of the Ancients', the central Finn Cycle text from medieval Ireland.
Speaking about his election, Professor Murray said: "I am very honoured to have been elected as a Member of the RIA which, since its foundation, has been to the fore of Irish-language scholarship. Through the work of the Academy, I hope to be able to further contribute to the dissemination of scholarship on Gaelic sources and to support the important work on our cultural heritage which the Royal Irish Academy consistently champions."
Professor John O’Halloran MRIA, President of UCC, said: "It is wonderful to see four outstanding UCC researchers elected to the Royal Irish Academy this year. This prestigious recognition is testament to the exceptional talent and impact of these staff members and reflects the ambitious research and innovation culture across this university. We congratulate our researchers on this wonderful achievement and look forward to their future contributions to the Academy, to UCC and to society."
Professor Daniel Carey, President of the Royal Irish Academy, said: "It is a great pleasure to welcome this year’s newly elected members to the Royal Irish Academy. The breadth of expertise represented among them reflects the richness and diversity of scholarship and public service across Ireland and beyond. We look forward to the insights and expertise these new members will bring to the Academy’s work in advancing trusted, independent and evidence-based dialogue across the island."