Joe Silke, Marine Institute, researches shellfish safety and harmful algal blooms. He is working to find more efficient and low cost means of carrying out effective monitoring programmes, ultimately resulting in greater production of shellfish as a high quality primary food source.
Mark Jessop is a Marine Biologist in the Marine Ecology Group at the Coastal & Marine Research Centre (CMRC). He studies everything from the overwintering distribution of Atlantic puffins to the foraging ecology of Northern gannets and the diet and diving behavior of grey and harbour seals.
Thomas Furey is a Geoscientist at the Marine Institue. He works on developing integrated mapping for the sustainable development of Ireland’s marine resource. He is also a keen sailor currently involved in Galway Bay Sailing Club dinghy racing.
Graigory Sutherland is a Canadian doing his PhD at NUI Galway in Physical Oceanography. He’s interested in exploring the mysteries of physics in the upper ocean by studying physical processes associated with turbulence and mixing in the upper region of the ocean.
Siddhi Joshi is a PhD student in the Biogeosciences Group, Earth and Ocean Science at NUI Galway. Her research is very interdisciplinary in nature, spanning a range of areas such as marine geology, marine ecology, geophysics, physical oceanography, remote sensing and surveying.
Sebastian Landwehr is a PhD student at NUI Galway who is trying to find out how much CO2 the Ocean takes out of the atmosphere and the driving forces behind it. He is originally from Germany and likes swimming in the cold Atlantic ocean.
Joao Luis de Almeida is from Portugal and is completing a PhD at NUI Galway in Ocean Atmosphere CO2 exchange who enjoys the incredibly rewarding experience of going to sea, on oceanographic cruises to collect data.
Dr. Tomasz Dabrowski is a marine modeller at the Marine Institute. His research includes ecosystem modelling and shellfish growth models. In his spare time he likes to go mountaineering, cycle and play tennis. He is also a former captain of the NUIG Table Tennis club. If he could make one discovery, it would be advanced life on other planets, for the simple comfort of knowing we are not so lonely in our vast universe!
Edward Farrell is a Research Fellow at the Marine Institute, researching the biology and ecology of marine fish, sharks in particular, an interest which was sparked while on a gap year in South Africa, after his Zoology degree from UCD. In his spare time he likes to go fishing (surprisingly!), and if he could do one thing in his career, it would be to make people aware of how important sharks are to the health of the oceans, they aren’t all like Jaws!
Guy Westbrook is a Ocean Scientist who worked in marine engineering then returned to university as a mature student to do a Degree and PhD back to back. He worked on a series of deep field scientific surveys the length of the Atlantic Ocean during the mid to late 90’s and then re-located to Ireland to work in the Marine Institute. Apart from renovating an old house, he shares two horses with his wife so he rides a lot – and also spends a lot of time on his motorcycle and mountain bike.
Dr. Glen Nolan works in Oceanographic Services at the Marine Institute. The research he does is mainly figuring out how currents and water masses around Ireland interact with each other to answer questions asked by fisheries and environmental scientists and by the general public. He is a proud Dub living in Galway for 16 years. He started out as a geographer before specialising in Oceanography.
Maeve Edwards works as a Marine Biologist in the Ryan Institute at NUI Galway where she cultivaties native species of seaweeds, like kelp and dulse, at sea on longlines, for use as food and/or biofuel. She’s also interested in researching several different species of fish and shellfish. She enjoys outdoor activities such as diving, and is a member of Seasearch. When the weather is too bad to dive, she enjoys dressmaking and reading. If she were to make one great discovery, it would be to isolate compounds in seaweeds that would be shown to aid in the fight against diabetes.
Sky
Darius Ceburnis is a member of the Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry group at NUI Galway. He is an experimental person who likes discovering things in nature and spreading them to the world and hopes to discover a natural cycle linking marine biology with the atmosphere and aerosols controlling Earth’s climate.
Niall O’Sullivan studies the air-sea exchange of C02 at NUI Galway who would love to discover a form of renewable self sustaining energy because he believes it would change the world for the better.
James McGrath is a PhD student in the Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies (C-CAPS) at NUI Galway. He is developing a computational model of to measure exposure to particulate matter in indoor microenvironments.
Space
Susan Collins is studying pulsar astronomy at NUI Galway. She is interested in how information travels and is captured, such as light radiation from distant stars. Since the telescope systems we have now lose a lot of the light from objects we look at, she would love to find a way to capture or recover more light from faint objects.
Paul Moran studies Pulsar Astrophysics at NUI Galway. He’s interested in Multi-wavelength observations of Pulsars. He’d like to discover anything that advances astronomers knowledge of pulsar astrophysics because At present, despite over 40 years of research in this area, a full understanding of the basic physics of pulsars is lacking.
Aonghus Mullins is soing a PhD in Star Formation in Extreme Environments. He looks at Massive stars, which although rare in number, have a disproportionate effect on the overall formation of stars in a molecular cloud. He investigate how the massive amounts of radiation emitted by these stars, and also their rapid evolution to supernova explosions, affect nearby star forming regions.
Ronan Rochford works on Computational Plasma Physics and loves learning and getting to utilise the power of Super-computing which he describes as an open-source of knowledge where everyone can contribute something. A keen footballer, he has won All-Irelands for NUI Galway.
Diarmaid de Búrca researches reverse engineering pulsar optical emission at NUI Galway. Though he’s really like to discover a relationship between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, he figures that in his line of research he’s more likely to discover a theory of pulsar emission.
Navtej Singh studies Globular clusters/Black holes at NUI Galway. A native of India, he enjoys the stimulating and challenging problems of his work and gets much satisfaction from solving them. His favourite part of his work is trying to understand exotic processes in nature.
Brandon Wiles studies Computational Astrophysics at NUI Galway. A native of Decatur, Georgia in the United States, he studies 6 languages in his spare time, Latin, Classical Greek, french, Spanish, Irish and Mandarin Chinese. His favourite part of his research is developing models for novel situations, and interpretations of data.
