Dr Scott Rickard, Director of UCD CASL
Established in 2006, CASL acts as a multidisciplinary research hub, which builds on the investment in established research clusters, such as the Shannon Institute and the Adaptive Information Cluster, as well as SFI/PRTLI Cycle 3-funded principal investigators (PIs) and their teams. It also taps into the knowledge and expertise of various UCD Schools.
What distinguishes CASL is its sheer scale: it brings together 25 of Ireland’s leading PIs and more than 150 postgrads and postdocs from the UCD Schools of Business; Computer Science & Informatics; Electrical, Electronic & Mechanical Engineering; Geological Sciences; Mathematical Sciences; as well as the UCD Conway Institute; and organises them into overlapping thematic areas underpinned by the core language of computational science, applied mathematics and informatics.
According to Dr Scott Rickard, the MIT and Princeton-educated mathematician who is Director of the centre, bringing together so many disciplines under one roof is a highly unusual and pioneering move.
“It’s a flagship, groundbreaking facility in Ireland and still quite rare internationally, too. Interdisciplinary research usually consists of small groups working on very focused themes. There is simply nothing of the scale of CASL.”
CASL occupies a 2,500 sqare metre purpose-built facility adjacent to the Belfield campus consisting of open-plan offices and break-out areas for the exploration of ideas and concepts. The centre is funded by UCD and in addition, individual PIs and PI teams have secured funding amounting to €50m from a variety of state agencies and external sources over the last five years.
A series of scientific programmes is underway in areas identified as being of key importance nationally and internationally, including biomedical and health informatics; systems biology; finance; wireless technologies; energy; and the environment.
Dr Rickard’s vision for CASL is that research groups will form almost organically based on common research interests. “The idea is that people will come in and form natural teams. You might have an economist wanting to sit next to a biologist and a mathematician; they will form a team and work together on a project for 18 months, three years, or whatever and then disperse again back to their disciplines. Flexibility is extremely important to our ethos.”
As Director, Dr Rickard was responsible for recruiting the PIs and researchers to the facility. It has turned out to be a much easier task than expected, which to him indicates the great enthusiasm that exists for CASL’s interdisciplinary structure.
“I found it extremely easy to convince people to come here; they wanted to be part of this. They had wanted to work with particular individuals for some time but hadn’t been able to because of the physical separation that existed between different disciplines. Now, finally, there’s an opportunity to break down that barrier.”
