2009 Press Releases

Winter Conferrings at University College Cork (UCC) - December 9th
09.12.2009

Winter conferring ceremonies commenced today (December 9th 2009) at UCC with over 500 undergraduate and postgraduate students graduating from the College of Medicine & Heath and the College of Science, Engineering & Food Science (SEFS).

The Conferring addresses were given by Professor Joyce Fitzpatrick, Adjunct Professor, Catherine McAuley School of Nursing & Midwifery, UCC (attached), Professor Michael Berndt, Head of the College of Medicine & Health, UCC (attached) and Dr Peter Heffernan, Chief Executive, Marine Institute (attached).

Professor John O’Halloran, Vice-Head of the College of Science, Engineering & Food Science, UCC and Professor David Sheehan, Department of Biochemistry, UCC were conferred with a Doctorate of Science (DSc) for published work.

Also conferred were Fiona O'Neill and Krishan Lal who are the first graduates from the MSc in Pharmaceutical Technology and Quality Systems from UCC’s School of Pharmacy.  This two-year Masters programme was established with support from the Amgen Foundation in 2007 and designed in a distance learning format utilising the latest e-learning and web based learning initiatives thus making it attractive for candidates currently employed in the pharmaceutical sector. The course is approved by the Irish Medicines Board (IMB) and the successful candidates may now apply to the IMB to become registered as ‘Qualified Persons’ (QP) in the pharmaceutical industry.

Today’s conferrings also included the first cohort of DClinDent (Orthodontics) graduates. This three-year full-time programme, directed by Professor Declan Millett, is the first taught doctorate programme in Orthodontics in Ireland.  It was established with considerable support from the Health Services Executive (HSE), which is ongoing.  The programme is approved by the Irish Committee for Specialist Training in Dentistry and meets the educational requirements for the Membership/Fellowship in Orthodontics examinations of the Royal Colleges.  The graduates are now eligible for inclusion on the Register of Dental Specialists held by the Dental Council of Ireland.

The first group of students who successfully completed the one year Masters in Public Health course were also were conferred as were the first graduates of the MSc in Applied Science (Marine Biology), the first course of its kind in the country.  Also conferred were the first graduates of the MSc in Applied Science (Ecological Assessment), a course supported by Skill Nets along with the first cohort of MSc (Biomedical Sciences).  This degree is jointly awarded with Cork Institute of Technology (CIT).

The ceremonies continue tomorrow (December 10th) and conclude on Friday (December 11th).
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Conferring Address by Professor Joyce Fitzpatrick, Adjunct Professor, Catherine McAuley School of Nursing & Midwifery, UCC, December 9th 2009
It is indeed an honour and privilege for me to present this commencement address today. You, the BSc nursing graduates, are the future of our discipline and the future of health care, not just in Ireland but globally.

But before we begin with the “heavy stuff”, the inherent and somewhat obligatory part of a commencement speech…

Let me first of all offer my sincere congratulations to each one of you. You should be filled with joy this day, with pride and honour that you are an accomplished professional. Enjoy the day and your accomplishments.

As a researcher, the first thing that I did in preparation for this speech was a brief survey, asking my friends and colleagues whether they could remember who the commencement speaker was at their graduation ceremony.

Not one person remembered.

What they did remember was whether or not the speech was too long. So I can assure you that even though you may not remember my name, you will remember this speech as brief. Hopefully you will remember the three important messages, beyond the congratulations.

You undoubtedly know that now, your life work is beginning. My first message to you is one I learned early in my career from one of my mentors and advisors, Dr. Margretta Styles, who described nursing as an “exquisite obsession”. It has been that for me, and I hope you also have learned to appreciate the exquisite nature of your work, and eventually I hope you become obsessed by it. For those who are cared for by nurses, those whose quality of life is enhanced; those who are one step closer to leading a normal life; those whose pain is reduced by nursing interventions; those who are helped to walk, to talk, to play, to sing again; those for whom nurses have made a difference…nursing is exquisite.

My second message to you is to go forth and change the world… quite a simple message, for it is rather easy to make a difference in our world today.

There are so many things you can do, the challenge is selecting the path that is best for you and matches your knowledge and skills. Thanks to the faculty, your fellow students, and the many others you have met along the path of your education, you have many new skills and talents.

Much of your learning has come from the faculty, leaders in health care who have been your role models and teachers in the past four years. You also have undoubtedly learned a great deal from your fellow classmates and your colleagues in clinical practice. And, importantly, you have learned from your friends and family members. Cherish what you have learned and become obsessed by new learning.

Two years ago, when I spoke to the postgraduate nurses at UCC, I had just finished reading President Clinton’s 2007 book, titled simply: “Giving: How each of us can change the world”

If you have any doubt about how to change the world, and how to put your skills and talents to good use, I would strongly recommend that you read this book. The stories in the book are wonderful examples of small and large efforts to do good in a world that needs the collective efforts of all of us. Many of us in nursing harbour the believe that it was Clinton’s mother, a nurse, who introduced him to his core philosophical beliefs regarding commitment to others and the greater good, social justice, and self-sacrifice for the good of less fortunate in the world.

Clinton describes gifts of money (e.g., Bill and Melinda Gates who have given millions of dollars through their foundation, most of which has been targeted to health care globally); gifts of time, including volunteers who provide services to others in need, whether in times of disaster or in areas where there are few services; gifts of things (clothes, books, supplies); and gifts of skills, especially education (teaching others how to read, providing health care services). Clinton also describes two other important kinds of gifts, gifts of philanthropy (gifts that keep on giving) and gifts to good ideas, funding social entrepreneurs. 

Your skills as health care professionals are extremely important gifts that you can give to others, volunteering to care for those in need.

By now you no doubt have heard of Greg Mortenson, a nurse profiled in Clinton’s book, who wrote the best selling book, “Three Cups of Tea”, describing his commitment to building primary schools in Afghanistan, so that the children there would have educational opportunities. Mortenson’s story is one of exquisite obsession.

Shortly after finishing Clinton’s book on Giving, I decided to prepare a book focused on nurse educators and nursing students, profiling the many stories of how they are changing the world through acts of giving. Throughout my career in nursing I have met hundreds of nurses who give selflessly to others. In particular, I have known hundreds of nurse educators who have designed “giving” projects for themselves and their students. Service learning, a form of meaningful experiential learning which combines classroom activities with community service projects, has become commonplace in nursing curricula at both the basic and graduate levels.

For my new book, titled Giving through Teaching: How Nurse Educators Are Changing the World which will be published in 2010, we collected stories from nurse educators about how they and their students give of their time, talents, skills, and resources, to make the world a better place. These stories are woven throughout the book. Story telling is a means of building a relationship with others; and of course interpersonal relationships are at the core of what we do as nurses. And from what I have learned of the Irish culture, storytelling is an important part of the fabric of your lives.

Consider the story of nurse Marie, who has volunteered her time each summer since 1988 to provide primary health care services to migrant farm workers in Oregon. She described this experience as “life changing” as she travelled by van throughout the region to care for thousands of farm workers and their families.

Consider the story of student nurses in several small Pennsylvania communities who started Teddy Bear Clinics, to teach children about healthy life styles, including hand washing, oral hygiene, injury prevention, first aid, and safety. These children also are taught the importance of bicycle safety, including wearing a helmet when riding a bike and basic hand turning signals. They learn how to ride safely on a street and to follow traffic rules.

Consider the story of nurses in Staten Island New York, where there is the largest Liberian immigrant population outside of Africa. Most of these immigrants are refugees, torture survivors, and former child soldiers, many are undocumented immigrants. The nurses developed an African Refuge community center to provide health promotion, HIV and Hepatitis C testing and counselling, and blood pressure screening for these individuals who would not have access to health care services in any other way.

In our new book we have profiled hundreds of stories of nurses giving to the world, nurse educators who take their students to underserved communities in Argentina to Zambia, but also those who serve to poor and underserved in our own US communities, where the needs are just as great. We have profiled nurses’ work in disasters, including those that are natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, and those that are unnatural such as the Oklahoma bombing incident. We expect that the stories of nurses that we profiled will inspire others to do likewise, and to tell their stories as well. According to Clinton: “Almost everyone…regardless of income, available time, age, and skills can do something useful for others and, in the process, strengthen the fabric of our shared humanity.”

While in the past, we were taught to “give back” to others, we are now encouraged to “give forward,” for you never know when you or a family member of friend might be in need. You can give forward by cleaning up a neighbourhood park, organizing a string quartet to play at a nursing home, helping rebuild a home destroyed by the recent floods in Ireland, or taking a terminally ill sick friend on a holiday weekend. The holiday season is a perfect time to do good, to think of those less fortunate.

My third and final message is to develop a global perspective in your lives and work. It is a small world.

I grew up in a small town of about 1000 individuals, perhaps not too different from your own home towns. Although I left the small town for the big city life, I did not travel outside the North American continent until I was in my 30s. I have since dined with orphan children in Uganda and ministers in Syria. I have provided workshops for nurses and physicians from Australia to Zimbabwe, from Beijing to Chile and Jordan. No matter where I went the connections with other nurses were instantaneous. We spoke the same nursing language and had the same values of caring and commitment to humanity.

There will be many opportunities for you to visit and work in other places, all of which will enrich your work locally. And, of course, today it is not even necessary for you to physically travel in order to have global connections. The internet makes it possible for us to connect with colleagues throughout the world, with very little cost and often instantaneous response. Most journals publish the email address of the major authors…you should not hesitate to contact them to let them know how you were able to relate their work to your own practice, and importantly to share your insights about next steps in the process of improving practice. We are all counting on your leadership for Irish health care, and more broadly, for improving the health care and lives of people throughout the world. We hope that you will join us in considering your new profession of nursing as an exquisite obsession.

As I look out at you the proud graduates and also the proud parents and family members, I am reminded of my Irish American father, who rarely introduced me by name, but no matter what I had accomplished, always introduced my as “my daughter, the nurse”. Parents who are here have every right to celebrate today as well as the graduates, for you have made a good investment in your own future. You will have someone to care for you in the future, and to be your advocate in negotiating the health care system. Congratulations to you as well as to each of the graduates.

I wish each of the graduates success in the future, in your careers and in your lives.
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Conferring Address by Professor Michael Berndt, Head of College of Medicine & Health, UCC, December 9th 2009
One of the inevitable questions asked at interview is where one sees oneself in five years time, with the usual response targeted to the situation and what one hopes is the expected response. In reality, it is a question that is essentially unanswerable. Five years ago, I would not have predicted after a research career spanning nearly thirty years in Australia that I would in my mid-fifties move half way around the world to Ireland to take up an Executive Dean role as Head of the College of Medicine and Health at University College Cork. In hindsight, it was even less obvious in my early career where the future lay.

I was raised in what was then a small country town in South East Queensland in Australia that like Milwaukee in the USA had been co-settled in the 1860s by Irish and German immigrants. To the west in familiar sounding centres and towns like Kerry, Killarney and Rathdowney, the Irish had settled and become dairy farmers.  Closer to the coast in Beenleigh where I was born the Irish were the townspeople and the Germans as the surrounding farming community grew sugar cane.  My father was Lutheran but my mother was of Scottish descent and catholic and my father on marriage converted. Thus in primary school I was raised by Irish nuns and the local priest was also Irish. The highlight of the year was the Saint Patrick’s Day concert. These were the times when a letter from the head nun secured a scholarship to secondary education in a boarding school run by the Marist brothers.

Coming from a small country town I knew only one person who had gone to University. I asked what he did in first year and then took the same subjects! I completed my undergraduate BSc degree at age 19 at the University of Queensland in 1973 with a major in both organic chemistry and biochemistry, far too young and still unclear on any career path. A research honours year was the clear default choice, but isolating alkaloids from marine coral did not inspire, so I shifted to the biochemistry department and then to a PhD in the field of mechanistic enzymology. Doing a PhD in those times was a very different experience to that of those of you who graduated with a PhD today. One was given a topic at the start of the PhD and then left to get on with it. Supervision was minimal and delivered infrequently very much using the “rough end of the pineapple” approach. In retrospect, we were given enormous freedom to do our own research but still graduated as fully trained researchers.

It was at this time that chance events shaped my future career. In the last year of my PhD, I had decided to continue my research career and was looking to do a post-doc overseas but had little idea how to proceed or where to go. Another PhD student finishing at that time had arranged to do a post-doc with David Phillips in the biochemistry department at St Jude children’s research hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, but had withdrawn to further a career as a concert pianist. I wrote proffering myself as an alternate, on the basis of similar training. I was offered the position to do research on human platelets, a project that shaped my entire subsequent career, not by foresight but by serendipity and through the choices of others.

Saint Jude children’s hospital was a transforming experience. This was the charitable institution founded by Danny Thomas that in the 1970s had made the breakthroughs in the treatment of childhood leukaemia, from a probable death sentence to majority cure. This was also an exciting time to become involved in platelet biology, a research area still in its infancy, with only a handful of prominent research laboratories internationally in the field. It was known at this time that platelets prevented blood loss by adhering to the damaged blood vessel to initiate the formation of a platelet aggregate or thrombus. This process occurring inappropriately caused heart attack and stroke. While during my career I focussed on how blood cells initially stick to blood vessels, David Phillips concentrated on how the platelets clumped together to form thrombus. He showed this was due to a specific platelet surface receptor. Exploiting this platelet specific expression, he went on to found a multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company and develop one of the antiplatelet agents now widely used to prevent thrombosis post-coronary arterial stenting.

It is interesting how this was achieved. A group at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla had identified that this receptor functioned by recognition of a small protein sequence, arginine glycine aspartic acid or rgd in single letter code, a finding which they had patented. Phillips took the approach of screening snake venoms and identified that they contained an inhibitor that had this rgd sequence. He screened over eighty snake species and found one with a variation, lysine instead of arginine, kgd instead of rgd. This allowed drug development without the impediment of prior patent issues. Again it was a chance event that in this case ensured success.

In your careers as you proceed, I would encourage you also to expect the unexpected and take up opportunities as they arise. I congratulate you all on your achievement here today. I would encourage you going forward to take a global view, to listen to the views of others, to observe and learn. Having had a career in research, I have had the opportunity to have travelled widely. I still remember vividly the emotion on seeing in 1979 that in Mississippi there were still black and white toilets and overt discrimination. I worked in France in 1984 and china in 1985. In 1989 I worked in Moscow six weeks before the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin wall. These were all defining experiences during which I met and learnt from inspirational people. One such person was Changgeng Ruan in Suzhou who was declared Chinese person of the year during the late eighties. In 1985, his was one of only ten state supported laboratories in any field in china. Changgeng had trained as a physician. He was the first person after the cultural revolution, during which he toiled in the rice paddies, to leave china and obtain a PhD in a foreign country, France. This was the foundation for his career. UCC has also given each of you the foundation for your future careers. I wish each of you well in your own future extraordinary journeys.
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Conferring Address by Dr Peter Heffernan, Chief Executive, The Marine Institute, December 9th 2009
Good afternoon everybody and congratulations on your achievements across such a wide area of postgraduate science; ranging from analytical chemistry to biotechnology, mobile computing and ecological assessment. I am particularly honoured to be the first person ever to address the newly conferred group of MSc graduates in Applied Science (Marine Biology) which, as you can guess from my own background, is a subject close to my heart.

In spite of the fact that we are “an island nation” – as that great Cork broadcaster Tom McSweeney reminds us – it has taken a great deal of time to get the subject of the sea onto the curriculum and into the public mind. Twenty years ago in Ireland, back in 1989, we did marine science from the back of a converted inshore trawler that could only ever reach ten percent of our 220 million acre marine territory, conducted scientific analysis in leaky Portacabins with mouldy walls and the idea of a national Marine Institute was a dream that was yet to take form in the Marine Institute Act of 1991.

Fifteen years ago, the Marine Institute was eight people with a vision, sitting around a table in an office in Dublin trying to work out how we could make that dream a reality. At the time, none of us could be certain where we would be in 2009. But we could imagine it. And, with that vision in our minds, we put in place the laboratories, the ships and the equipment that prompted the European Commission’s Director General for Research José Manuel Silva Rodriguez to describe the Institute as a “star in Atlantic marine research” on his visit to Ireland earlier this year.
 
That is why the quotation on my office door reads “imagination is more important that knowledge.” It was coined by none other than Albert Einstein, who often took time off to clear his head of theories about time and space with an afternoon in his sailing boat – Tom McSweeney would be proud.

Where will you be in ten years time? We can chart our progress from the past to the present by looking backwards but, unless Albert Einstein and the physics department of UCC has developed a time machine they haven’t told us about yet, the only way we can travel to the future is by using our imaginations – just as Albert Einstein recommended.

So let’s imagine that the year is not 2009 but 2020 and that I am speaking to you not at your conferring but at a very exclusive gathering to celebrate the Marine Institute’s annual awards for “the three most outstanding contributions to our island nation” awards some of you will be receiving today from me – ten years from now.

Our first award goes to Marianne, who graduated with an Applied Science MSc Biotechnology from UCC back in 2009 and has recently been promoted to Head of Research at an enterprise which was established in 2018 under the Marine Institute’s Sea Change Beaufort Marine Biodiscovery programme to work on the recovery of bioactive compounds from deep sea sponges and starfish. This research programme relied on a steady supply of quality specimens collected from depths of over 3,000 metres in the Porcupine Sea Bight. Using a new generation of Remotely Operate Vehicle, launched from the R.V. Celtic Explorer, live specimens were collected in pressurised containers and brought to the surface for analysis in the laboratory.

According to Marianne – “Bioactive substances isolated from live deep sea organisms offer great potential for the development of a new generation of drugs to heal a variety of human illnesses. Today, following a major breakthrough in isolating an anti-cancer compound from a species of starfish and a pain relief agent from a species of sponge in October last year, our company have applied for patents and undertaken preliminary clinical trials which look extremely promising.”
 
Marianne also tells me that one critical factor in her success over the past ten years has been the relationship she has developed with the researchers on the project. Through all the blind alleys and disappointments that are a necessary part of exploratory research, neither the researchers at the coal face, the company backers or the State funding agencies ever lost sight of the final goal. In Marianne’s view it was this team spirit of working on a project that was greater than the sum of its parts that led them to the success they so richly deserved.

Today, ocean energy is an idea that we accept as readily as we did wind energy ten years ago. But between 2009 and 2013 the idea that we could generate electricity by harnessing the power of the waves which batter our west coast in a cost effective way was still unproven.

It therefore gives me great pleasure to give our second award to Philip, whose Cork-based company had the vision and endurance to “weather the storm” of the long and difficult pilot phase at our offshore test site.

According to Phillip, “This whole sector has emerged as a major internationally traded sector for Ireland. Our company started from small beginnings with a quarter scale model on our wave energy test site in Galway Bay in 2007 followed by an accelerated three-year R&D programme part-funded by Sustainable Energy Ireland. This allowed us to develop a full-scale model for testing on the offshore grid-connected test site at Belmullet, Co. Mayo and to undertake a major scale up in 2013.

Today, our company is generating 150 megawatts to the grid from a wave farm development located off the coast of south Donegal. Our 50-strong project development team is actively working on two more farms off the west coast of Ireland, as well as one off the coast of France and the two in the States as part of California’s Green Energy Initiative. There is no doubt as to Ireland’s leadership position in this global market . . . We are powering on – on ocean energy!”
 
Neither of the two previous successes would have been possible had it not been for the enlightened attitude to sustainable marine development as part of government policy that has been displayed over the last ten years. For that, I know we are largely in the debt of our final award winner - Cork graduate Sorcha, whose recent promotion to the post of Secretary General at the Department of the Taoiseach is to be truly welcomed.

Throughout her long career, spanning the Departments of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Education Trade and Employment and finally in Transport, she has always displayed a clear vision of how government policy can be guided towards its objectives by the insights provided by science.

During that time, Sorcha has constantly consulted the scientific community for advice on marine issues and many of us here in this room tonight have contributed to the various position papers and briefing meetings she has requested of us. According to Sorcha, “Every time I had a problem explaining the value of our marine resource, the presence on my wall of the Marine Institute’s “Real Map of Ireland” – showing our 220 million acres of seabed territory –helped me to demonstrate the reality that far from being a legislative headache, our marine territory is one of our most valuable resources.”

On your behalf, it gives me great pleasure to acknowledge her problem solving attitude to the challenges we have all faced and her joined up thinking in tacking the multi-faceted aspects of policy making in the marine sector by presenting her with this award.

This is where we could all be in ten years time, given the imagination, the energy and the love of what we’re about. In 2005 Steve Jobs CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios gave a commencement speech at Stanford University in a situation much like the one I find myself in today as I attempt to look into the future. 
One of his messages was that “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. That approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Fifteen years ago, none of us had any idea where the dots we were drawing would take us with the Marine Institute, but by trusting in the vision we all shared we created something that will outlast us all and reach far beyond even the 220 million acres of our national marine territory. Today, Irish seabed mapping projects such as the Irish National Seabed Survey and INFOMAR, as well as economic research and foresight initiatives put in place by Ireland as part of the Sea Change Marine Knowledge, Research and Innovation Strategy for Ireland 2007 – 2013 have influenced the focus of the EU Seventh Framework Programme towards marine-orientated topics, which has been of benefit to marine researchers across Europe, including those here in UCC. 

And speaking in Dublin in 2006 Dr. Joe Borg, European Commissioner for Maritime Affairs acknowledged that the Galway Declaration, agreed at the EurOcean 2004 Conference, hosted by Ireland’s Marine Institute was “one of the key factors stimulating our initiative to develop the Green Paper on EU Maritime Policy.”

By undertaking the studies that you have so successfully completed, you have put a lot of dots in place for a bright future in science, or industry, or whatever path you choose to follow. Believe in your dreams and recognise the true value of having an opportunity to work on something for which you have a passion.

In that quest I wish you every success. 

ENDS

Pictured with Programme Director, Professor Declan Millett (centre) Orthodontic Unit, University Dental School & Hospital, UCC are the first cohort of DClinDent (Orthodontics) graduates who were conferred today (December 9th 2009) at UCC. L-R: Dr Kevin O’Rourke, Dr Paula Murray, Dr Ciara Campbell and Dr Gerard O’Mahony.

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