Three UCD researchers, Dr Debra Laefer, Dr Orina Belton and Dr Trudee Fair, have been awarded SFI Principal Investigator Career Advancement (PICA) Awards. The Principal Investigator Career Advancement Award helps ensure that Irish-based researchers either in permanent or contract positions who have interrupted their careers to take maternity, adoptive, parental or carers leave have an equal opportunity to compete.
Out of ten awards recently granted, at a total cost in excess of €4m over three years, three of the recipients are from UCD who between them have six children and took six blocks of maternity leave. “The competition was based first and foremost on scientific excellence which passed international peer-review in a similar fashion to the mainstream Principal Investigator (PI) programme”, said Dr Mary Kelly, SFI Scientific Programme Officer.
Dr Debra Laefer, School Of Architecture, Landscape & Civil Engineering, recently relocated to Ireland from a tenure-track position at North Carolina State University in the US. She earned her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001. Her PICA project GUILD: Generating Urban Infrastructure from LiDAR data is a cooperative program between Civil Engineering and Computer Science that uses cutting edge, remote sensing technology to help predict any negative impacts on existing buildings from infrastructure related construction. Dr Laefer took maternity leave in 2005 for the birth of her baby girl.
Dr Orina Belton of the School of Medicine and Medical Sciences and the Conway Institute is combining leading edge technologies, genomics and proteomics, with human and experimental models to address a previously unmet need in vascular biology. Heart attacks arise from thrombosis of arteries damaged by atherosclerosis. Orina previously showed that dietary administration of a naturally occurring lipid called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) inhibits the development of atherosclerosis and completely reverses the disease. “With the PICA funding I aim to use CLA as a tool to identify the genes and proteins that are involved both in decreasing the risk and inducing regression of atherosclerosis.” Orina took six months maternity leave for the birth of both of her boys.
Dr Trudee Fair of the School of Agriculture, Food Science & Veterinary Medicine will study factors that affect embryo development and successful establishment of pregnancy in mammals. Her goal is to identify the genes of the Major Histocompatability Complex (MHC) that are specifically associated with embryo survival. The findings may indicate the cause of early embryo mortality in both human and bovine species and might be useful in diagnostic screening of infertile couples. Trudee took up to six months maternity leave following the birth of each of her three boys, having to put her research on hold. “The SFI-PICA award puts me in the position to set up my own research group in UCD and raises my research profile considerably. I am delighted to be given this opportunity”.
