Dr Hugh Brady, UCD President and Professor Shuh Narumiya, recipient of Ulysses Medal.
Professor Shuh Narumiya has been awarded the prestigious Ulysses Medal at a ceremony in the UCD Conway Institute this month. The Ulysses Medal is the highest honour the university can bestow, and is awarded to those who have made an outstanding contribution to scholarship in their field.
Professor Narumiya, who is based in Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine, is one of the world’s leading experts in the area of signalling and physiologic function of the prostaglandins and thromboxanes and also in the cellular function of Rho proteins. He addressed an audience in the UCD Conway Institute on the occasion of his award on the subject of ‘Rho signalling in cell and body function’.
On introducing him, Professor Therese Kinsella of the UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science said that Professor Narumiya could rightly be called the ‘father figure’ of two areas of research, namely in the fields of the prostanoids and the Ras homologue (Rho) protein family. His research and discoveries in these areas have resulted in over 370 peer-reviewed publications and significant grant awards from the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) and others. Professor Narumiya has also received a number of honorary awards in recognition of the importance of his work, including the Japan Academy Imperial Prize in 2006.
UCD President Hugh Brady presented the Ulysses Medal to Professor Narumiya and congratulated him on his life’s work saying; “He has reinvented the field of cell signalling and cell biology over the last twenty years. Of all the people in this room today, I think I can safely say that about 88 per cent of them are already using Professor Narumiya’s work, and the remaining people will be using it in the near future.”
