Research centre Lero is to invest €2.9 million to fund a number of postdoctoral fellowships in a bid to facilitate responsible innovation.
The centre, funded under the SFI Research Centres programme, will fund 16 fellowships, concentrating in building software expertise to develop innovation focusing on privacy, trust, inclusion and fairness. Participants will be given training to assist their career development, with a comprehensive set of courses designed to improve their transferable skills.
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The two-year fellowships for the systems, methods, context (SyMeCo) research training programme will be available at Lero’s 12 partner universities and institutes of technology, and it is hoped the programme will attract international researchers from the computer science, software engineering, information systems and human-computer interaction fields.
Lero director Prof Brian Fitzgerald, from University of Limerick where Lero is hosted, will head up SyMeCo.
“These fellowships will bring together leading researchers from across the world and, when recruited, will contribute significantly to Lero’s and Ireland’s research agenda, engaging with experienced researchers and industry partners across the country. All 16 fellows will be highly skilled future research leaders and we have no doubt that they will be much sought after by industry, the public sector and academia,” Prof Fitzgerald said.
“The key research strands underpinning SyMeCo reinforce Lero’s own key research strands: systems – what we build; methods – how we build these systems; and context – for the world we want. The programme proposes a transformative agenda that takes account of the ever-changing software development landscape while also seeking to shape it.”
Funding for the programme will come through Science Foundation Ireland and the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Cofund programme.
“Fellowship programmes like SyMeCo are vital to the Irish research landscape attracting top researchers to the European Union, and significantly to Ireland and Limerick,” said Prof Norelee Kennedy, vice-president of research at UL. “It is testament to Lero’s research reputation, and its record in developing and delivering fellowship programmes that the centre has been awarded this funding.”
