IRC Research Allies Awards for AMBER Colleagues

8 December 2022

AMBER’s Deirdre Caden & Max García Melchor Irish Research Council 2022 Research Allies award winners.

Deirdre was awarded in the Research & Technical Support category

Deirdre is the International Engagement Manager at AMBER and has over 15 years’ research administration and management experience in national, EU and international funding. She has excellent knowledge of the research and innovation funding landscape in Ireland, the EU and internationally, with extensive experience of research strategy development and implementation, including proposal development, consortium building, grant preparation and proposal writing, particularly in the EU Framework programmes.

Alongside providing one-to-one proposal supports to investigators, Deirdre has responsibility for the direction and implementation of the Centre’s international (non-exchequer) research funding strategy, with the goal of maximising research income to the Centre and its investigators across AMBER’s 9 partner institutions.

Max was awarded in the Supervisor & Mentor category

Dr. Max García-Melchor is an Ussher Assistant Professor in Chemical Energy Systems in the School of Chemistry of Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), and Principal Investigator in the Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research (AMBER) Centre.

Since 2016, he leads the very active Computational Catalysis and Energy Materials (CCEM) Group, which strives to use advanced computational methods and artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of cost-effective materials for the sustainable production of chemicals and fuels. His research has contributed to several breakthroughs in the field, including the elucidation of complex reaction mechanisms in C–H activation and C–C coupling processes, the development of machine learning models to predict the activity of molecular water oxidation catalysts, and the design of some of the most active electrocatalysts reported to date for this process in alkaline media.