The five winners of Tyndall's 2023 Wrixon bursaries. Image: Tyndall
The bursary winners are working on various projects such as novel sensor interfaces, new ways to assess knees and attempts to enable ultra high-speed systems.
Five postgraduate students at Tyndall National Institute have been awarded Wrixon bursaries to aid them in their studies.
Three of the researchers received a bursary for research excellence, while two received a travel bursary to conduct research internationally.
The Wrixon bursaries were launched in 2022 to mark Tyndall’s 40th anniversary and are supported by the generosity of Prof Gerry Wrixon, a past president of UCC and a leading member of the team that founded Tyndall.
Prof William Scanlon, Tyndall CEO, previously said the aim of these awards is “to continue to nurture, develop and retain our ground-breaking researchers”. This was when Dr Cara-Lena Nies was awarded a Wrixon bursary for research excellence last year.
Speaking about the latest awards, Scanlon said the five students are “worthy winners” and that he is “pleased that their accomplishments have been recognised”.
“These annual Wrixon bursaries are awarded to our postgraduate students in recognition of research excellence in new deep-tech discoveries and next-generation innovations that address global challenges in ICT, health, agri-food, the environment and energy,” Scanlon said.
“We hope that this bursary continues to inspire and support our postgraduate community to continue with their important research.”
The three recipients of the 2023 bursaries for research excellence are Liudmila Khokhlova, Zhongzheng Wang and Stephen Murphy. Khokhlova is researching the development of a novel, non-invasive method to assess the status of knees using acoustic emission monitoring.
Wang’s PhD work is on designing novel electrochemical sensor interfaces, which are used for the identification of specific chemical species and have uses in various fields such as agricultural production, food quality monitoring and medical diagnostics. Wang’s project has an emphasis on sensor interfaces that have high precision, less complexity and low-power consumption.
Murphy’s research aims to support the rising demand in bandwidth – with the growth of services such as 8K video streaming, VR applications and future mobile services such as 6G. His research focuses on how novel signal processing algorithms based on neural networks could be used to overcome non-linear fibre and photonic device behaviour – with the aim of enabling ultra high-speed systems.
The two recipients of the Wrixon 2023 travel bursaries are Daragh Crowley and Saif Wakeel. Crowley will travel to the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, where he will work on surgical guidance systems using electromagnetic tracking.
Wakeel will travel to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, to develop a library of multiphoton polymerisation-based 3D printing of novel micro-optic components for pluggable photonic packaging demonstrators.
Find out how emerging tech trends are transforming tomorrow with our new podcast, Future Human: The Series. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
