Research Newsletter - Issue 114: Good News
Research Ireland Frontiers for the Future Projects Awards in DCU
Congratulations to all researchers in DCU on being awarded Research Ireland Frontiers for the Future (Projects) funding! Research initiatives funded under the Frontiers for the Future programme enable independent investigators to pursue bold ideas and innovative research over a four- to five-year period.
PI: Dr Darren Fayne (School of Chemical Sciences)
Project Title: Mapping the human pocketome - using pharmacophores to enable drug discovery applications
The discovery of new medicines is a complex process – hugely expensive in terms of money and time. Advances in computation, biology and chemistry now allow us to model how potential drugs binds specifically to a disease related biomolecule enabling the identification of the 'Achilles heel' of disease-related molecular signalling events and the specific disruption of disease. By making use of computational design technology, the project will create new software to interlink biology and chemistry insights to design better “keys” for our battle against disease; starting with prostate cancer and an aggressive lung cancer.
PI: Dr David Long (School of Physical Sciences)
Project Title: Determining the origin of solar energetic particles
Shock waves are the most efficient way of accelerating particles in the universe, but are difficult to reproduce and study on Earth. Fortunately, the Sun is a nearby, natural astrophysical laboratory which regularly produces shocks that accelerate particles to very high energies. We can therefore observe these shocks and measure the energetic particles that they accelerate with very high precision. However, we still don’t know how these particles are initially energised. Recent results suggest that very small solar flares (called “campfires”) could energise these particles before they’re accelerated by solar shocks. The SEP Origins project will answer this open question.
PI: Prof. Paolo Guasoni (School of Mathematical Sciences)
Project Title: Payment Channel Networks: Theory and Application
Despite recent technological advances, the current payment system still relies on a legacy architecture that is characterised by high costs and significant privacy risks. This proposal articulates a research programme that aims at unlocking the potential of payment-channel networks to provide efficient, reliable, and privacy-oriented payments. The challenge is to design the basic components of such networks to optimise the use of resources and to devise incentives so that participants seamlessly cooperate to transmit each other’s payments across the network.