January E-zine

I was delighted to welcome An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar TD and DCU Alumnus Noel Rock TD to our ‘DCU in the Community’ outreach facility in Ballymun recently.

Founded in 2008 by DCU, in partnership Dublin City Council, ‘DCU in the Community’ acts as a bridge between the university and the local and regional community. Led by Joanna Ozarowska, Manager of ‘DCU in the Community’, and Ruth Lynam coordinator of DCU Volunteer, the facility’s activities focus on lifelong learning, adult education, equity of access to third level education (among groups underrepresented in higher and further education), student volunteering, community-based learning, and community-engaged research.

The mission of ‘DCU in the Community’ is to promote social regeneration through education and to enhance local community development and community resilience through the provision of flexible educational and lifelong learning opportunities. It also seeks to provide meaningful  volunteering options for DCU students.

An Taoiseach met graduates of our ‘Bridge to Education’ Programme (a preparatory course designed to build capacity and confidence, as well as the necessary skills to return to education), student volunteers and student social enterprises (Raising & Giving Society, HeadstARTS), staff from DCU Recovery College and recent recipients of the President’s Award for Engagement, Dr Briege Casey, Dr Mary Rose Sweeney, and Prof Deirdre Butler.

We recently had the honour of welcoming Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, to our St. Patrick’s campus to discuss the issue of bullying and online safety.

Her visit coincided with Facebook’s announcement that it was tripling its investment in online safety programmes run by the National Anti-Bullying Centre (ABC) at DCU, bringing the company’s total investment in online safety programmes in Ireland to €1 million. This will have a profound impact on the lives of thousands of students and their families.

This investment will go towards supporting important research conducted by the ABC, expanding the nationwide online safety training programme for teachers and parents of secondary school students, and creating online safety resources for teens in partnership with the youth organisation, SpunOut.ie.

At a workshop in our Institute of Education, Ms Sandberg met with a group of teachers to discuss the issue of bullying in schools and to hear first-hand experiences from those dealing with bullying both on and offline. She reaffirmed the company's commitment to tackling online bullying.

Following the meeting, Ms Sandberg addressed over 100 teachers attending the first anti-bullying training session as part of this programme. In her remarks, she highlighted how Facebook was hiring more people to review content reports, and is investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for finding and preventing abuse across all their platforms - Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

To mark her visit, I was pleased to present Ms. Sandberg with a copy of ‘100 Poems’ by Seamus Heaney.

January 2019 was a milestone month for researchers from our Centre for Astrophysics and Relativity (CfAR) with a Nature publication describing their central involvement in a major breakthrough that explains the existence of massive black holes in the universe and that predicts a greater number than previously thought.

The light from the most distant black holes (or quasars) has been travelling towards earth for more than 13 billion light years, allowing us to look back in time to the early universe. However, how these monster black holes formed has remained unknown; until now.

Dr. John Regan and Prof. Turlough Downes, both from the School of Mathematical Sciences in DCU, collaborated with colleagues from Georgia Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, the University of California at San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and IBM, in the discovery of a new and extremely promising avenue for solving this cosmic riddle.

The team showed that when galaxies assemble extremely rapidly, and sometimes violently, this can lead to the formation of a massive black hole.

The rapid assembly of gas means that instead of normal star formation proceeding, embryonic stars become puffed up by hot gas. This leads to the formation of what is called a “supermassive” star, which only survives for a short time before quickly collapsing into a massive black hole.

 The new study turns upside down the long-accepted belief that massive black hole formation could only happen in regions bombarded by powerful radiation from nearby galaxies. This research shifts that paradigm and opens up a whole new area of research.

Congratulations to John and Turlough!

We were delighted to be joined by Minister for Higher Education, Mary Mitchell O’Connor TD, for the launch of a new entry route into the B.Ed. undergraduate programme. This ne route enables deaf people who use Irish Sign Language (ISL) to enter primary teaching.

The first pathway of this nature in the history of the State, the new B.Ed. (Irish Sign Language) is being provided in our Institute of Education from this September - initially on a pilot basis.

The new pathway sees the existing prerequisite for Leaving Certificate higher-level Irish being replaced with an entry requirement at a similar level in Irish Sign Language.

While entry to the course is exclusively for members of the Deaf Community who wish to become primary school teachers working in the deaf education sector, core modules will be delivered along with hearing peers in the B.Ed. programme, while modules specific to deaf education will be delivered as a specialism. The four-year, full-time undergraduate course also includes a 30-week school placement.

Sincere thanks to everyone involved in this important initiative and, in particular, to Dr Elizabeth Mathews from our School of Inclusive and Special Education, who has been unwavering in her commitment over the past eight years towards establishing this pathway.

Congratulations to Prof. Donal O’Gorman of our School of Health and Human Performance, who has been appointed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to its Medical Board.

The Board is responsible for guaranteeing the safety and well-being of humans in spaceflight and for ensuring the ethical conduct of research studies. The Board also establishes and approves the medical and psychological criteria for astronaut selection.

An exercise physiologist specialising in whole-body and skeletal muscle metabolism, Donal is the current Director of the National Institute of Cellular Biotechnology (NICB). Healso leads the 3U Diabetes Consortium, and is chair of the DCU Research Ethics Committee.

His appointment is a reflection of the sterling work carried out by Donal and his outstanding research contributions in the discipline of exercise physiology over a long number of years.

It is also noteworthy that this is the first time that Ireland has been represented at this level and it is a powerful endorsement of the international significance of Donal’s research.

In his work with the ESA, Donal has been investigating the changes that take place due to inactivity. During spaceflight, astronauts experience changes in their bodies that are similar to accelerated ageing. This work is helping us understand how metabolism can be regulated in the microgravity of space and this information is also being used to learn about ageing and age-related diseases on Earth.