Today, SFI officially announced the launch of a number of new CSETs (Centres for Science Engineering and Technology) and SRCs (Strategic Research Clusters).
Professor Frank Gannon, Director General SFI, added; “Today’s research award recipients and the teams that they have assembled are of world-class calibre. I believe that the initiatives to be undertaken by SFI over the coming seven years will provide a cornerstone for Ireland’s future economic development, with CSETs and SRCs playing a key role”.
CSETs are SFI’s largest award type, and are typically in the €10 – €20million range over five years. These awards tend to fund teams of up to 50 researches, including Principal Investigators (PIs), post-docs and graduate students. The CSET programme has been running for about 5 years now, and the latest CSET to be funded is one that I have had responsibility for – namely Centre for Next Generation Localisation, being run out of DCU (with TCD, UCD and UL / LRC as academic partners), and headed up by Professor Josef van Genabith, also of DCU.
SRCs are a new type of programme within SFI. They are clusters (as the name suggests) between two or more investigators, who typically want to study a problem or set of problems that is greater than any one of them alone could work on. The SRCs are in the region of €4 – €8million over five years, and are designed to bridge the gap between single investigator grants, and the much large CSETs. One SRC that I handled, being led by Prof. Stewart Fotheringham of the National Centre for Geocomputation at NUI Maynooth was funded in the area of advanced geotechnologies.
We can expect really interesting things from these centres/clusters over the next number of years.
As usual, the ever-reliable Silicon Republic picks up the story.
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