The government has announced a €14.6m investment in 25 projects to support early career researchers under the SFI-IRC Pathway programme.
The awards, designed to support Ireland’s emerging research talent, will enable postdoctoral researchers to develop their career pathway and transition to become independent research leaders.
The funding, covering a four-year period, will provide additional support for a postgraduate student who will be primarily supervised by the awardee.
Two researchers from Tyndall National Institute, based at University College Cork, received funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Council (IRC) under the pathway programme.
Tyndall's award-winning researchers are:
1) Dr Alessandra Imbrogno, postdoctoral researcher, micro and nano systems at Tyndall
‘Green energy storage: development of sustainable supercapacitors by direct laser writing of natural materials (SUPER-GREEN)’
The rapid increase in demand for powered IoT sensor devices poses environmental concerns both in terms of high energy production requirements and end-of-life disposal. Implementation of eco-friendly energy storage systems and self-powered solutions is crucial to ensure future sustainability of the IoT sector.
Accordingly, SUPER-GREEN proposes the development of novel self-powered and eco-friendly supercapacitors whereby electrode materials will be fabricated by direct laser writing of biopolymers and eco-friendly materials will be used as electrolytes. Self-powering features based on triboelectric processes will be incorporated, also using low-cost environmental materials.
The final aim is the ambitious realisation of compostable and green supercapacitors. Based on initial proof-of concept supercapacitors realised from cork and chitosan-based polymers, the aim is to expand both the performance and the low environmental footprint of fabricated devices and to test their performance for practical IoT powering applications.
The compostable nature of the “all natural” supercapacitive platforms will be assessed, thus opening the way for future development of energy storage platforms with fully degradable capabilities.
2) Dr Chinmoy Kundu, senior scientist, micro and nano systems at Tyndall
‘Designing secure integrated sensing and communication systems for next generation wireless networks (SECUREISAC)’
Future wireless networks will support many emerging services, such as, remote healthcare, indoor localisation, factory automation, Wi-Fi sensing, unmanned aerial vehicles, and autonomous driving. These applications demand precise sensing and localisation.
Traditionally, sensing and communication systems are designed separately. However, due to the rapid proliferation of wireless devices and mobile services, the frequency spectrum is becoming increasingly congested. Therefore, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems are becoming popular. ISAC designs sensing and communication functionality jointly by considering the shared spectrum, energy, and hardware resources.
As information-bearing signals are reused for the purpose of sensing, the sensing signal itself is susceptible to eavesdropping by targets. Therefore, the aim of the project is to secure the ISAC transmission from eavesdropping.
Deviating from the traditional methods of providing security through cryptography which require secret key management and heavy computation, the security in ISAC will be provided at signal level through physical layer security (PLS) techniques.
In this project, Dr Kundu will develop secure transmit waveforms and receive beam formers for large-scale ISAC systems consisting of multiple targets against active and passive eavesdroppers while serving multiple users. Dr Kundu will formulate mathematical optimisation problems to obtain solutions by developing novel signal processing algorithms and machine learning techniques.
Dr Ruth Freeman, director, Science for Society at Science Foundation Ireland, said: “We are delighted to work in partnership with our colleagues in the IRC to deliver the SFI-IRC Pathway programme.
"It provides targeted support to early-career researchers who will use the funding to pursue independent research at the frontiers of knowledge. Investment in these projects will generate novel discoveries and insights across diverse research topics, from environmental sustainability to disease treatment and prevention, to wireless network security.”
The 25 research projects will be funded through 13 research bodies, as follows: Trinity College Dublin (2); Maynooth University (1); University College Cork (3); Tyndall National Institute (2); University College Dublin (7); Technological University Dublin (1); University of Limerick (1); Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (1); RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences (1); The National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (1); South East Technological University (1); University of Galway (2); Dundalk Institute of Technology (1); Dublin City University (1).