Welcome to the UCD School of Earth Sciences
We are the largest Geoscience School in Ireland, bringing together the skills and expertise of fourteen academic staff, seven support staff, sixteen contract research staff and thirty postgraduate students.
Our core undergraduate degree programme is a BSc degree in Geology in which the development of field skills is highly valued. We also have collaborative teaching links with Trinity College Dublin, the UCD Schools of Civil Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the School of Biology and Environmental Science.
We also offer a MSc in ‘Subsurface characterisation and geomodelling’, a one-year taught programme designed to equip graduates with the skills to understand, model and visualise the subsurface. The course covers both the shallow (10s m) and deeper (km) subsurface and provides training critical to a range of industry and applied research application areas including carbon capture and storage, geothermal energy, sourcing energy critical elements, groundwater supply and protection, geotechnical services and waste management.
An emphasis in our undergraduate and MSc degree programmes is the provision of a sound academic training in independent observational and interpretational skills. Fieldwork training, in Ireland and abroad, is a key ingredient in our courses. Our degree programmes reflect the needs of society and industry and provide graduates who are internationally highly regarded.
As a dynamic and active research school, our staff have been very successful in obtaining research grants, from national and international funding agencies and from industry. Our research is focussed through a number of research groups within the School, all of which publish regularly in international scientific journals. The School hosts the SFI-funded Irish Centre for Research in Applied Geosciences (iCRAG) as well as the National Centre for Isotope Geochemistry.
The School's main research groups are in the areas of:
- Fault Analysis
- Geochronology, Petrology and Isotope Geochemistry
- Geophysics
- Marine Geology and Surface Processes
- Palaeobiology
- Palaeoclimatology
All six research groups have strong international collaborative links.
The School of Earth Sciences is one of seven schools in the UCD College of Science. We are located on the ground floor of Science Centre West and on the 3rd floor of Science East on the Belfield campus.
Professor Peter Haughton
Head of School
UCD School of Earth Sciences