Students battling Covid-19 on the frontline are among the high-achievers from University College Cork's College of Medicine and Health to be honoured with an Undergraduate Quercus College Scholarship.

• Professor Psychogiou’s appointment will help Ireland become a European innovation leader for wireless communications and future 6G technologies.
• Inspirational leader in STEM will motivate future generations to pursue a career in microwave engineering, which cannot currently meet demands from industry and has a gender imbalance.

University College Cork and Tyndall National Institute have announced the appointment of Professor Dimitra Psychogiou, a global expert in RF front-end technologies, to the position of Professor of RF Microwave Communications in the School of Engineering.

Prof. Psychogiou will also assume the role of Head of Group for Advanced Radio Frequency (RF) Technologies at the Tyndall National Institute, where she will undertake internationally-leading research at the Microelectronics Circuits Centre Ireland (MCCI).

Professor Psychogiou, who joins from the University of Colorado Boulder, USA, will lead a new research programme to develop disruptive RF technologies for the next generation of 5G/6G communications.

A national study that is examining the issue of drug use among students in higher education, led by Dr Michael Byrne, Head of the Student Health Service at UCC, is underway and students are being asked to check their emails so they can participate. 

Generations of musical talent from Seán Ó Riada to Ann Cleare have learned their trade at University College Cork - and now future cohorts of musicians will benefit as its Department of Music has been awarded the largest gift in its 113 year history.

The estate of Sidney V. Regan has bequeathed €2M to the Department of Music at UCC, and the announcement coincides with the unveiling of UCC’s new Sound Studio, the most significant investment in the Department of Music in recent years.

Professor Eugene C. Freuder, Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science & Information Technology at University College Cork, has been recognised with the world's premier award in the field of artificial intelligence.

Prof. Freuder, the founding director of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, which transitioned into part of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, has been granted the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Research Excellence Award.

The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results.

UCC’s Prof Barry O’Sullivan has won the 2020 Nerode Prize, one of the top prizes in computer science jointly awarded by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IPEC). Prof. O’Sullivan holds the Chair of Constraint Programming in the School of Computer Science & IT at UCC.

• Bifidobacterium longum APC1472 has promising beneficial effects on the metabolism of obese people. 
• The B.Longum APC1472 strain reduced fasting blood glucose levels and normalised active levels of ghrelin, a hormone that signals hunger, and the stress hormone cortisol, both of which are altered in obese people. 

Worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980 and most of the world’s population now live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight. Obesity represents a major health challenge because it substantially increases the risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes. In recent years, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes has soared worldwide with approximately 462 million individuals affected, corresponding to 6.28% of the world’s population. 

Dr. Harriet Schellekens and colleagues, at the APC Microbiome Ireland SFI Research Centre in UCC, identified Bifidobacterium longum APC1472 to be an important regulator of apetite and metabolism during laboratory studies.

University College Cork celebrates its 175th anniversary today, December 30; on that date in 1845 the university formally came into being as Queen's College Cork (QCC).

QCC was founded as one of three Queen’s Colleges located in Belfast, Cork, and Galway, under an Act “to enable her Majesty” – Queen Victoria – “to endow Colleges for the Advancement of Learning in Ireland".

A research centre for energy, climate and marine based at University College Cork has joined forces with an Irish tech development company to collaborate on subsea superconductor research to transform large scale power generation from offshore renewables.