Welcome

On behalf of the NUIG-UL Strategic Alliance, we are delighted to welcome you all to our 5th Annual Postgraduate Research Day.

In total, we received 175 abstracts, and these were reviewed by a panel of academics from across Science, Engineering and Informatics. All papers have been invited to present at our interactive poster session and competition. Our reviewers identified a further four papers for plenary presentation, twelve for parallel sessions, and fifteen for “Thesis in 3” presentations, which gives a total of 31 Ph.D. presentations for today.

Our conference theme is to explore career opportunities for Ph.D. graduates, and we have an excellent line-up of speakers to present keynote talks, including: Dr. Claire Sheridan (Industry), Dr. Shane Deegan (Startups), and Dr. Martin O’Halloran (Academia). Furthermore, in the afternoon parallel sessions, our keynote speakers are: Dr. Emmet O’Reilly (Science), Dr. Peter Corcoran (Engineering), and Dr. Cathal Seoighe (Interdisciplinary). We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our speakers for giving up time from their busy schedules to enrich our conference.

We acknowledge the generous sponsorship of this event by the NUI Galway/UL Alliance, the College of Science (NUIG), the College of Engineering and Informatics (NUIG), and the Faculty of Science and Engineering (UL).

We would like to thank all of you for contributing and attending today, and wish you an enjoyable day here in NUI Galway.

Best wishes,

Jim Duggan and Adrienne Gorman (NUIG and Co-Chairs)Conor McCarthy, Eileen Madden (UL)Dane Flannery, Claire Mitchell (NUIG)

AgendA

09.30 - 10.25 Registration, Poster Set-up and Coffee10.25 - 10.40 Welcome & Opening

Prof. Lokesh Joshi, VP Research, NUIG10.40 - 10.45 Conference Overview

Dr. Adrienne Gorman10.45 - 11.45 Plenary Session I

Chair: Dr. Adrienne Gorman10.45 - 11.15 Invited Talk - Dr. Claire Sheridan

“Industry Careers for Ph.D. Graduates”11.15 - 11.30 Research Talk - Emma Tarpey

“Treatment of dairy processing effluent using IASBR Technology”

11.30 - 11.45

Research Talk - Patrick Mannion“Learning Traffic Signal Control with Advice”

11.45 - 12.45 Plenary Session IIChair: Dr. Conor McCarthy

11.45 - 12.15 Invited Talk - Dr. Shane Deegan“Startup Careers for Ph.D. Graduates”

12.15 - 12.30 Research Talk - Ahmad Ziaee “Theoretical Study of Adsorption in SIFSIX-3-Zn Type Porous Materials”

12.30 - 12.45 Research Talk - Conall Holohan “Anaerobic digestion of lipids: the development of a multifaceted solution”

12.45 - 14.15 Poster Judging & Light Lunch 14.15 - 16.15 Parallel Sessions (Information Technology Building)16.30 - 17.15 Plenary Session III

Chair: Dr. Jim Duggan16.30 - 17.00 Invited Talk - Dr. Martin O’Halloran

“Academic Careers for Ph.D. Graduates”17.00 - 17.15 Overall Q & A Session17.15 - 19.30 Prize Giving and Closing Address

Dr. Jim Browne, President, NUI Galway.BBQ Reception in College Bar

14.15 - 16.15 Parellel Session – Science (IT125)Chair: Dr. Susan Logue

14.15 - 14.45 Invited Talk – Dr. Emmet O’Reilly“Conducting polymers as transduction mechanisms in biomedical sensing platforms.”

14.45 - 15.00 Research Talk – Radu Groza“ARMES: a new tool using multi-dimensional anisotropy and chemometrics for protein structure analysis”

15.00 - 15.15 Research Talk - Vivek Verma“Crystallisation of Carbamazepine onto Excipients”

15.15 - 15.45 Thesis in Three Talks“Microalgae as an alternative renewable source of omega-3 fatty acids”

Justine Aussant“Anomalous Hall effect in electrolessly-deposited Ni-B thin films”

Cian McKeown“Revisiting the Kinetics and Thermodynamics of the Low-Temperature

Oxidation Pathways of Alkanes: A Case Study using the Pentane Isomers”John Bugler

“Mismanagement of iron homeostasis in iron-loaded ex vivo slice cultures”Sinead Healy

“Investigation into the preparation of amorphous solid dispersions of BCS Class II drugs using a milling process”

Ciara Griffin15.45 - 16.00 Research Talk - Barbara Schaller

“Methane to Methanol – A Solution for Alternative Fuels”16.00 - 16.15 Research Talk - Pauric Bannigan

“Influencing the dissolution rate Clofazimine”

PArAllel session 1: science

14.15 - 16.15 Parallel Session – Engineering (IT202)Chair: Prof. Peter McHugh

14.15 - 14.45 Invited Talk – Dr. Peter Corcoran“The Internet of Things (IoT)”

14.45 - 15.00 Research Talk – Kyriakos Spanoudes“New tricks for old materials: The Glycomer™ 631 case”

15.00 - 15.15 Research Talk - Ilaria CinelliThermo-Electrical Equivalents for Simulating the Electro-Mechanical Behaviour of Biological Tissue

15.15 - 15.45 Thesis in Three Talks“Inhibition of the ROCK signalling pathway in mouse osteoblasts”

Irene Simfia“Computational and Experimental Characterisation of Bioprosthetic Heart

Valve Positioning to Enhance Long Term Performance”Orla McGee

“Optimzation of Multi-Pole Debye Functions for Electromagnetic Tissue Modeling”

SaQib SalaHudDin“A GPU Accelerated Microwave Tomography System for Breast Cancer

Screening”Atif Shahzad

“Experimental and Computational Material Characterisation for High Efficiency, High Flexibility Power Generation”

Eimear O’Hara15.45 - 16.00 Research Talk – Conor O’Hagan

“Effect of high temperature corrosion on the service life of P91 piping in biomass co-firing”

16.00 - 16.15 Research Talk – Catherine O’Connor“Active Response of Smooth Muscle and Arterial Tissue to Stenting”

PArAllel session 2: engineering

14.15 - 16.15 Parallel Session – Interdisciplinary (IT204)Chair: Dr. Alessandra Mileo

14.15 - 14.45 Invited Talk – Prof. Cathal Seoighe“Computational deconvolution of gene expression data from heterogeneous biological samples”

14.45 - 15.00 Research Talk – Kieran Flesk“Dynamic Selection of Virtual Machines via Reinforcement Learning”

15.00 - 15.15 Research Talk – Helen Hasenfuss“An exploration of real time programmable haptic & tactile structures for TUIs”

15.15 - 15.45 Thesis in Three Talks“A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Pedestrian and Traffic

Management in Smart Cities”Martin Duggan

“Resistance to Defection on Random Geometric Graph Models”Christine Marshall

“An R-Based Framework for Implementing Large-Scale Spatial Models of Infectious Diseases”

Martina Curran“Implementing Avoidance in Particle Swarm Optimisation”

Karl Mason“Query Difficulty Estimation and Query Expansion to improve IR Accuracy”

Chris Loughnane15.45 - 16.00 Research Talk – Ronan Egan

“Classifying Cocyclic Butson Hadamard Matrices”16.00 - 16.15 Research Talk – Claire Gallagher

“Implementation of a Mobile Alert System for Sales Forecasting Based on a Tree Augmented Naïve Bayes Classifier”

PArAllel session 3: interdisciPlinAry

Dr. Emmet O’ReillyEmmet O’Reilly obtained his PhD in 2008 from the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute in Dublin City University and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Science in UL. Prior to this position he worked as a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle, CNRS, Montpellier France. His primary research interests include the design and synthesis of conducting polymers for biomedical and material science applications. He has

extensive experience in the synthesis and characterisation of both organic and inorganic polymers as well as their incorporation into biomedical sensing devices.

Dr. Peter CorcoranPeter is a Statutory Lecturer in the College of Engineering and Informatics (CoEI) and a Fellow of IEEE; a former Vice-Dean of Research & Graduate Studies in the CoEI (7 year tenure from 2005-2012); he is also Editor-in-Chief and founding Editor of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine (2011- ), a serving Board Member of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society and the IEEE Biometrics Council and a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of the CE Society (2013- ). He has an extensive list of technical

publications and is a prolific inventor, being named Irish co-inventor of the year in 2014 (with Petronel Bigioi) and also inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.  He is currently lead PI on a new Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) funded Industry/Academic partnership to develop “Next Generation Smartphone Imaging”.

Prof. Cathal SeoigheCathal studied theoretical physics (BSc) and molecular evolution/bioinformatics (PhD) in Trinity College Dublin. Following a short postdoc at the Royal College of Surgeons he took up a position as director of training at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI). He became a senior lecturer in bioinformatics at SANBI, and subsequently associate professor and director of the computational biology group at the University of Cape Town in 2004. In 2009 he joined NUI Galway as Stokes Professor of

Bioinformatics. Research interests include sources and consequences of variation in genomics data as well as the development of methods to analyze high throughput data from heterogeneous samples. His research group also has interests in diverse areas of molecular evolution from probabilistic modeling of viral sequence evolution to evolutionary aspects of gene expression regulation and mRNA splicing.

invited sPeAkers

invited sPeAkers

Dr. Claire SheridanClaire Sheridan is an enterprise data management architect with eight years technical consulting experience building end-to-end data solutions for customers from a variety of industries. Her PhD research investigated the application of event-enabled platforms and data science techniques to monitor in-flight business processes. Claire began her professional career as a consultant in London, and has recently returned to Galway in the role of analytics and data modelling architect.

Dr. Shane DeeganShane Deegan completed his Ph.D. at NUI Galway in 2012, achieving 8 publications from his research focusing on the identification of alternative cell death pathways in cancer cells. Shane was recruited by an international diagnostic company as a senior scientist in their R&D department. His research focused on biomarker discovery and multiplex immunoassay development. His experience in generating SOPs, employing quality control systems and adhering to

GMP and GLP guidelines was developed while working there. Shane was the first recruit to Aquila Bioscience in 2014. Shane’s role in Aquila includes managing R&D activities, market research, networking, grant/contract writing, implementing quality systems and administrative roles.

Dr. Martin O’HalloranMartin O’Halloran is a Science Foundation Ireland Investigator at the National University of Ireland Galway. His research explores the use of low-power electromagnetic waves for medical imaging and therapeutic applications. He was the youngest ever successful proposer of a European COST Action, and is now leading a network of over 180 medical device researchers from 24 countries. In the last two years, he has secured over €1.4 million in direct research funding.

He has received over 20 national and international research awards, and last year was awarded NUIG’s Early-Stage Researcher of the Year and Engineers Ireland Chartered Engineer of the Year.