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IN 2007, WHEN the University took its final leave of Earlsfort Terrace, as the last staff and students moved to Belfield, we organised a Farewell to the Terrace festival that included a garden party in the Iveagh Gardens for 5,000 alumni and friends of UCD. So, we thought, if the Earlsfort Terrace graduates could enjoy such a reunion celebration, then so too should the generations who stepped off the Number 10 bus, stomped at gigs in the restaurant, played Superleague on the far fields, sweated in the library, saw the cherry blossom come into bloom each April, cheered at debates and queued for the annual screening of The Life of Brian.

Belfield 50 was planned as a celebration for the generations of students and staff who breathed life into the campus over the five decades since the main body of faculties and administration moved to Belfield in 1970.

The COVID-19 lockdown forced us to pivot from campus events and gatherings to outdoor exhibitions, publications and online events. With the support of Professor Orla Feely, Vice-President for Research, the Belfield 50 team – Dr Ellen Rowley, Mary Staunton and myself – set about delivering some of the legacy projects that would mark the 50th milestone and to progress other projects that will take place in person later in the year.

CONVEYING SPACE EXHIBITION

Belfield became a very quiet place from March 13 2020 as its daily population shrank. In early summer, we called on photographer Daniel Holfeld to spend time on campus and create an exhibition Conveying Space to capture the atmosphere of the architecture in Belfield. An exhibition of 19 photographs were displayed by the lake between the Newman and Tierney buildings, from September 2020 to March 2021.

Working under cloudless skies with the sunlight casting strong angular shadows, Holfeld’s images focus on tightly cropped details of building structures to create stunning works of art in black and white that illuminate the subtleties of UCD’s iconic architecture.

SHAPING BELFIELD

With RTÉ producer Sarah Binchy (BA 1994), we chose voices from different decades for a special “Belfield Days” edition of RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany, including those of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (BA 1974, MPhil 1976, PhD 1982), Gerry Stembridge (BA 1979, MA 1980, HDipEd 1981), Professor of History at UCD Paul Rouse (BA 1990, MA 1992, PhD 2001) and Daisy Onubogu (BCL European 2015). Watch Shaping Belfield on our UCD YouTube channel.

MAKING BELFIELD: SPACE AND PLACE

Architectural historian Dr Ellen Rowley, UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy co-authored, with Professor Finola O’Kane Crimmins, Making Belfield: Space and Place at UCD. It examines the architecture of the campus, chronicles and contextualises the steps involved in the move to Belfield, touches on some of the treasures in the Belfield collections, and looks to the future of Belfield’s changing landscape.

TIMELINE EXHIBITION

Originally developed as part of a practical module for architecture and engineering students. Ellen and Tiago Faria encouraged the students to create and build a beautiful structure for the lower ground floor in the restaurant that included video booths and a rising portrait wall that was punctuated with natural light.

With lockdown the physical exhibition was put into storage and architecture student Aisling Mulligan designed a doublesided graphic set into the windows so that visitors to campus could enjoy it from outside the building. The Timeline Exhibition reflects the evolution of Belfield, from the turning of the sod on September 29 1970, to the vision for Future Campus and the Centre for Creativity, currently under construction. To go with the Timeline Exhibition, Dr Rowley produced a short film, Shaping Belfield, which tells the story of the architectural development of Belfield from its early use by the University to Future Campus. Learn more: https://www.ucdbelfield50.com/exhibition/

In 1970, the President of UCD, Dr Jeremiah J Hogan, said: “The opening of this new building … is a capital occasion in the history of University College. We shall now have between seven and eight thousand students here at Belfield, while about 3,000 remain at our various older centres. The greater part of the College will be here and it is a matter of time until all is here …” Fifty years on, Belfield is its own world – come on in and spend a while …

■ For details of all Belfield 50 events and exhibitions, visit www.ucdbelfield50.com

Boyle: An’, as it blowed an’ blowed, I often looked up at the sky an’ assed meself the question: What is the stars? What is the stars?
Joxer: Ah, that’s the question, that’s the question: what is the stars?

THE LONG-SUFFERING Juno didn’t have much time for the philosophising of her ne’er-do-well ‘Paycock’, but in fact, the Paycock was giving voice to a question that has motivated Irish women and men for at least 5,000 years. Brú na Bóinne – Ireland’s Valley of the Kings – is dramatic testament to a civilisation that looked skyward and mobilised its society towards creating what may very well be the oldest astronomical observatories in the world.

By the time “Juno and the Paycock” was first staged in 1924, Irish astronomers had been at the forefront of a revolution in astronomy that spanned the Victorian era and into the 20th century, so much so that it was an Irish astronomer who answered Boyle’s question just four years later in 1928: The legendary Sir William ‘Bill’ McCrea, from Ranelagh in Dublin, was one of the first to demonstrate that the sun and stars were made of gas – not iron as most people supposed.

“We have an amazing tradition of brilliant astronomy in Ireland,” observes Professor Lorraine Hanlon, Director of the UCD Centre for Space Research (C-Space), “and to this day we have a very active space and astronomy community.” It is that remarkable heritage – and the huge future potential – that inspired the creation of C-Space in 2020 as a University-wide Academic Centre for space-related research, innovation and education.

C-SPACE

The UCD Centre for Space Research (C-Space) was established in March 2020 and publicly launched on December 15 2020. More than 15 academic staff from five Schools in UCD are involved in this interdisciplinary research centre dedicated to space. The School of Physics plays a leading role in several of the C-Space research themes, including gamma-ray detectors, astrophysics and nanosatellites and payloads.

Today’s space scientists and engineers at UCD are embarked on a vastly different enterprise from the pure research of their illustrious predecessors: “Our purpose is to build partnerships with researchers and innovators across Ireland who may not even realise that space data is relevant to their work, and we want to advance the use of space to address global scientific and societal challenges,” says Professor Hanlon. “We want to bring together the academic researchers with the innovation hubs, to foster an awareness that space isn’t something that just big countries do. We see higher education institutions as knowledge brokers for open innovation. Knowledge co-creation and innovation is fundamental going forward.”

C-Space’s goal is to help build collaborations across UCD, but also nationally and internationally, in furtherance of Ireland’s space ambitions. One obvious example is space-based monitoring of our planet, which has a significant part to play in building a healthy world through data secured
from satellite-based Earth Observation missions.

“Ireland has access to data from the European Union’s armada of Earth Observation satellites,” explains Dr Ronan Wall, the C-Space manager. “Our researchers are already working with these data and with data from other satellites in areas such as Agri-Science, Environmental Science, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Climate Modelling, Ecology, Smart Cities & Transport, Renewable Energy, Archaeology and Geography.”

Professor Hanlon adds: “C-Space aims to create a partnership between innovation and research, because a lot of the applications and benefits of space-based systems rely on actors who would not necessarily have seen themselves as space data users and they haven’t always been aware of the benefits of space data for their work.”

HISTORY

UCD researchers have been pioneers in space science and technology for decades, and the Engineering faculty was a very early innovator in the use of technology satellites. Led by Professor John J Kelly (later Dean of the Faculty of Engineering), a UCD team worked with NASA to use the world’s first direct-broadcasting satellite (think of your Sky dish) for a revolutionary programme of lectures beamed directly to students in the Middle East. SHARE (Satellite Help for Rural Education) was officially launched in the late 1970’s by Uachtarán na hÉireann Patrick Hillery and Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan.

“We are immensely proud of this pioneering initiative,” said Emeritus Professor Kelly, “and visitors to the Engineering Building can still see a letter of thanks from the Crown Prince displayed on the wall.” Decades later, UCD’s links with the Middle East remain strong, thanks in part to the satellite-based learning programme, which continues to this day. In the summer of 2021, former President Mary McAleese followed in the footsteps of Dr Hillery and participated in a satellite link-up from Belfield to Bethlehem University. “It was a wonderful event,” said Professor Kelly, “and we are very keen for more people to know about this enormously valuable innovation using space technology.” UCD has also been a world leader for many decades in the development of space technology for high-energy physics research – delving into some of the most violent events in the universe. Starting in the 1960s, the legendary Neil Porter (Professor of Electron Physics) inspired generations of UCD students with his work on gamma rays. Gamma ray bursts appear to be generated in vast cataclysmic explosions, releasing in 20 seconds as much energy as our sun will produce in its entire lifetime. His work was referenced by Professor Stephen Hawking in his famous book A Short History of Time, and the much-loved UCD professor was described in the French version of Hawking’s book as the ‘savant irlandais’!

Neil Porter will forever be remembered as the man who established gamma ray astronomy in Ireland and his students have gone on to bring enormous credit to UCD and to Ireland. The late Trevor Weekes became famous in world astronomy as the architect of the VERITAS telescope array in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, south of Tucson. VERITAS stands for Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System. “The types of things we look for are pathological — stars that have exploded, the centres of galaxies where massive black holes are accreting matter,” Trevor once told me. “We are looking at energies and conditions that cannot be duplicated on Earth.” Throughout his career, Trevor Weekes devoted considerable time and effort to helping young UCD researchers and he is remembered with great affection by all who knew this gentle, humble and brilliant man. His colleagues in the United States preserve his memory through regular academic meetings which they call ‘TrevorFests’.

Another Neil Porter protegé at UCD, Professor George Miley, went on to pioneer a vast European radio-telescope network called LOFAR (Low Frequency Array), and had a leadership role with the joint US/Europe Hubble Space Telescope project. Professor Miley suggested LOFAR in 1997, and construction across Europe had begun by 2006. Ireland’s newest radio-telescope, iLOFAR, is part of the network and is located at Birr Castle in Co. Offaly. “It is fantastic that it has become a reality now and that it is actually being built,” says Professor Miley. “The project has become much more ambitious than my original plan. I’m a bit proud, I have to confess.”

Professor Miley concludes: “Astronomy is linked to cutting-edge technologies, fundamental science and the most profound culture, so it can be a unique tool for development throughout the world. Fanaticism and nationalism are put into perspective when you show young children how small our world is compared to the universe.”

George Miley served as director of Leiden Observatory from 1996 to 2003 and in 2012 he was made a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion, one of the country’s most prestigious awards, in recognition of his many years of service at the University of Leiden. As C-Space embarks on its ambitious programme, it is clear that they are standing on the shoulders of giants: Every aspect of the work of C-Space is touched in some way by UCD’s rich legacy of space research and innovation dating back all the way to the 1960’s.

“We aim to carry out excellent space-related fundamental and applied interdisciplinary research,” explains C-Space Manager Dr Ronan Wall. “We want to be a key national resource for space expertise and we would hope to inform and support national space policy development and implementation.” C-Space plans to achieve this by fostering industry/academic partnerships and collaborations, and by providing education and training which is relevant to both the creators of space hardware and satellites and those who will use the products of those satellites to provide services and new scientific insights. “A lot of really excellent work is already being done in faculties across UCD,” says Dr Wall, “but we hope to be a catalyst for even greater co-operation across disciplines.”

C-Space has identified six broad areas where it hopes to co-ordinate existing work and undertake internationally significant research of its own: ground- and space-based astrophysics, earth observation, gamma-ray detectors, space structure dynamics and control, space materials, and nanosatellites and payloads.

A CAREER IN SPACE

In addition, of course, C-Space has an important role in UCD’s mission to educate upcoming generations (and life-long learners). It is an interdisciplinary centre, with several constituent Schools, and each of them offer undergraduate and graduate study opportunities in space and space-relevant subjects. Most notable is the MSc in Space Science and Technology, which was established a decade ago after it became clear that Ireland’s fledgling space industry had a need for graduates who already had a broad range of skills relevant to the space sector and who would not require extensive training to slot into existing industry teams.

“This course is the perfect fit for anyone looking to get the best start towards a space-focused career,” explains Katelin Smith, who graduated from the programme in 2018. “Coming from a primarily physics background, this course exposed me to the engineering and design aspects of the space industry. A major highlight of the masters was the mission design field trip to Tenerife. Getting to design an entire space mission in an international team was an amazing experience.”

Another masters student, Meadhbh Griffin, actually got to work on a European Space Agency satellite project while she was on the course, and the mission she worked on was launched into space in the summer of 2021. “I’ve been hugely lucky to get a chance to work on something that will actually be going into orbit,” says Griffin. “Working on flight software means you’re thinking about what you’re doing the entire time, because there is no room for error.” Adding to the challenge, the COVID-19 pandemic meant she had to do much of her software writing and testing remotely, using a laptop with replica boards attached.

EIRSAT-1 PROJECT

But the space mission that Griffin and her colleagues have been most focused upon, and the one that will grab all the headlines in the coming years, is UCD’s own earth-orbiting spacecraft and Ireland’s first satellite: EIRSAT-1, the Educational Irish Research Satellite 1.
In addition to making history, UCD science and engineering students now have the opportunity to develop key skills that are much in demand in space research and the space industry. When it is completed, EIRSAT-1 will carry three experiments into Low Earth Orbit (about 400km above the Earth) aboard a small ‘cubesat’, a miniature spacecraft about the size of a one-litre carton of milk. Despite its small size, EIRSAT-1 promises to make real advances in gamma-ray astrophysics, advanced thermal materials and spacecraft control, and it will test out a unique Antenna Deployment Module which, like all the other experiments, has been developed in-house at UCD.

“All other full members of the European Space Agency already have their own satellites,” observes Dr Wall. “We need to keep pace in this fast-growing area to support Irish industry and research, and this project will build up full spacecraft systems and science payload capability in Ireland for the first time.”

David Murphy, a postdoctoral researcher at UCD and the Systems Engineer on EIRSAT-1, explains: “The most satisfying part of working on EIRSAT-1 is that it has brought together a large team of really dedicated students from across the University that are all focused on working together to turn our individual research topics into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts.”

Rachel Dunwoody is a PhD student who is funded by the Irish Research Council (one of eight IRC-funded students on the project). She is a member of the gamma-ray detector team and is also part of the overall flight operations team: “It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be on a student-led team that is developing the first Irish satellite. I never imagined I would get this amazing experience so early on in my career,” says Dunwoody.

SPACE AND THE PUBLIC

The EIRSAT-1 project is carried out with the support of the Education Office of the ESA, under the agency’s “Fly your Satellite!” Programme. As a result the staff and students are fully committed to using this historic project as a means of educating people in Ireland about the benefits of space research.

“One particular aspect of the project that I enjoy is the opportunity to share the groundbreaking story of Ireland’s first satellite with the public,” says Lána Salmon, an IRC-funded final year PhD student who leads the EIRSAT-1 outreach activities. She is also a member of the communications team, who works to ensure two-way communications between the ground and the satellite. “Space is engaging for kids and adults alike, and the talks, events and school visits have allowed me to contribute to the project through an activity that I really enjoy.”

Salmon and her colleagues on the communications team have been in close contact with Ireland’s large amateur radio community as they develop the communications system for EIRSAT-1. A dedicated antenna system has been installed on the roof of the Physics Building in Belfield and the team hope to be in contact with their spacecraft two or three times a day once it is in orbit.

“We had to put together a lot of new skill-sets and one of those was communicating with an orbiting satellite,” explains David Murphy. “It has not been the easiest! We always knew we would have to link up with the amateur radio community and I have to say that we have already been getting some fantastic help from them.”

Thanks to this new collaboration between UCD and the radio amateurs, plans are already afoot to allow people across the country to tune in to Ireland’s very own satellite after it is launched sometime in the next several years. UCD alumni who want to take an even more active part in this historic initiative and the public excitement that it is already generating should contact Dr Ronan Wall by email at space@ucd.ie or Jordan Campbell, UCD Foundation at info@ucdfoundation.ie.

EIRSAT-1 is likely too small to be seen in the night sky, but if all goes well it may be in orbit in time for the 100th anniversary of Captain Jack Boyle first asking his famous question on the Abbey stage in 1924. He and Joxer Daly might look up at the sky again an’ ass themselves the question: “What is that new star? What is that new star?”

VACCINE SUPPLY

Vaccelerate is an EU-funded pan-European clinical research network for the coordination and conduct of COVID-19 vaccine trials. Leading the Irish involvement is Professor Paddy Mallon, an expert in infectious diseases and the director of UCD Centre for Experimental Pathogen Host Research (CEPHR). Its aim is to help Europe be better prepared for any future pandemics by offering expertise, services, resources and solutions to speed up vaccine development, strategies and market authorisation.

“The funding award to UCD under Vaccelerate recognises the considerable research undertaken by the University and CEPHR in developing and validating new assays to be used in vaccine trials as well as providing laboratory capacity to this important European network,” says Professor Mallon.

NOT SO BATS

Bats are the focus of LongHealth, a study by Professor Emma Teeling of UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science, who is looking into why bats don’t age. Bats may be the starting point, but the research has relevance for human ageing: Professor Teeling was awarded €988,000 to fund her five-year project into the molecular basis and regulation of longer health span in mammals.

“Ageing is the biggest threat to human health globally, as people everywhere are living longer,” she says. “As the cost of caring for the elderly threatens to overwhelm healthcare infrastructures and disrupt society, we must find solutions to our ageing problem. Bats have naturally evolved the longest healthspan in mammals, showing little signs of ageing. LongHealth will uncover the molecular mechanisms that bats use to regulate their longer health span and will identify which bat ‘anti-ageing’ process is most likely to extend human health spans.”

VITAL STIMULATION

Parkinson’s Disease is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting over six million people worldwide. Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), which works through an electrode implanted in the brain, is sometimes used to calm the symptoms. However, some aspects of this treatment need improvement to maximise efficacy and reduce side-effects.

Professor Madeleine Lowery of UCD School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering has been awarded funding by the European Research Council to study DBS in more detail. Her team is developing a computer model of the neuromuscular system that shows how the DBS electrode is affecting surrounding brain tissue and the muscles it controls.

Understanding these characteristics will help clinicians decide on the most effective ‘dosages’ of DBS and the ultimate aim is to develop ‘smart’ DBS that can work out the correct levels of timely stimulation for itself. This will help prolong the electrode’s battery life and minimise the need for invasive surgery to replace it.

INCLUSIVE HEALTH MARKETS

How markets are organised and how they might be improved are key areas of research for UCD Professor of Marketing and Market Studies, Susi Geiger. For her five-year European Research Council-funded project, Misfires, Professor Geiger is turning her attention to healthcare and specifically to systemic market failures such as overpricing, access, and issues around how health data is handled.

“The objective is to guide new academic and policy thinking by establishing what research can do to make markets more inclusive and open them up to the concerns of those who are let down by them,” says Professor Geiger, who believes that widening the collaborative base is germane to solving these complex problems.

Ultimately, Misfires aims to look beyond industry influence and government regulation to other market actors, such as activists, patient groups and non-governmental organisations, to address these market failures.

AI FOR FINDING CANCER

Early diagnosis is critical to good outcomes when treating disease and one of the most promising methodologies now emerging to speed up the process is combining the dual powerhouses of medical research and artificial intelligence. iPATH-CAN, a joint project by UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science, the digital pathology company Deciphex and NovaUCD diagnostics company OncoMark, is harnessing AI to develop a tool that will identify early-stage breast and prostate cancers.

Professor William Gallagher of UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science says the three-year, €3m project, funded under the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund, builds on the substantial foundation of translational cancer research that has taken place at UCD over many years.

3-D IMAGING OF DISEASE

CoCID (Compact Cell Imaging Device) is a four-year, €5.7m pan-European research project investigating the cellular origins of disease. Coordinated by Assistant Professor Nicola Fletcher at UCD School of Veterinary Medicine, the project’s aim is to develop a laboratory-scale, soft X-ray microscope that will enable fast and inexpensive three-dimensional imaging of complete internal structures of intact biological cells. This will be used by scientists to better understand the disease pathways of viruses and to assist in the development of novel therapeutics.

TREATING LUNG CANCER

Lung cancer is a leading cause of death, yet there is still a lack of effective treatments to tackle the disease. Dr Rory Johnson of UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science is addressing this unmet clinical need with a project aimed at developing new therapies for lung cancer, using the latest genomic technologies.

Johnson’s aim is to discover new types of genes that promote lung cancer, and to develop drugs that inhibit their activity and ultimately kill the tumours. “This project depends on the latest CRISPRCas9 genome-engineering technology that allows one to delete genes from a cell’s DNA and test thousands of potential drug targets in a single experiment,” he says. Johnson’s research is being funded by SFI as part of its Future Research Leaders Award.

DIGITAL SURGERY

Colon and rectal cancers are the second most common major cancer in adults, and while early detection and advances in treatment mean more patients are being cured, clinicians are always looking for even better outcomes. Professor Ronan Cahill of UCD School of Medicine is a project leader on an innovative digital visualisation technology that will give surgeons more information about the extent and type of malignant tissue within seconds. This will help them make treatment decisions in real-time.

“Our method allows surgeons to ‘see’ the cancerous tissue and to distinguish it clearly from nearby normal tissue. This discovery has the potential to radically improve health outcomes,” Professor Cahill says. One of the key benefits of the technology, which is being funded under the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund, is that it is easy to deploy and uses software that allows surgeons to interpret the findings without having to develop further specialist knowledge.

LEARNING TO COPE FROM KIDS

The COVISION project, led by Assistant Professor Dr Suja Somanadhan of UCD School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems, aims to learn lessons from how children across the globe responded creatively to the pandemic and to use this as a basis for helping other children cope with the pandemic and its aftermath. The research is funded by the Health Research Board and the Irish Research Council and brings together a team of academics from Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Brazil, Canada, Scotland and the US.

OBESITY COMPLICATIONS

Obesity affects around 640 million people worldwide and health complications are common. Clinicians find it difficult to predict which patients are most at risk of developing complications. Professor Carel le Roux of UCD School of Medicine is the coordinator of a €16m international research consortium looking into the problem. SOPHIA (Stratification of Obese Phenotypes to Optimize Future Obesity Therapy) will focus on enabling healthcare professionals to identify which patients will develop complications and will respond best to treatment. The project is also examining the stigmatisation of obesity and how to change the way it is characterised in the media and society.

CULTURES OF CARE

Keeping older people well and at home for as long as possible is a key aim of the Government’s National Positive Ageing Strategy. Inter-agency and interprofessional teams are fundamental to the implementation of the Sláintecare programme. This will require a shift in cultures of care. The Eclectic project, led by Dr Deirdre O’Donnell, Assistant Professor of Health Systems at UCD, with the National Integrated Care Programme for Older People, will provide guidance on how inter-professional working can be achieved.

DIET AND IMMUNE TRAINING

Professor Helen Roche, director of the Conway Institute, is leading a five-year project on diet, immune training and metabolism, which has received funding of €1.3m from SFI, in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin.

Professor Roche’s area of research is nutrigenomics, which studies interactions between food and health from the genetic and mechanistic perspective. Diet and innate immune training are highly topical. During the pandemic, a clear link emerged between obesity and poor outcomes.

“As COVID-19 continued to spread, severe disease and mortality were observed in obese patients, but the relationship with diet goes beyond the adverse effects of obesity,” Professor Roche says. “Our work looks at how obesity and obesity-associated factors, such as dietary fats, suppress the innate immune response. On the other hand, we can also use nutrition to boost the immune response. The whole area of immuno-nutrition or ‘immune fitness’ is crucial in determining how someone responds to infection.”

PREGNANCY LIVING

Improving maternal and child health during pregnancy is the objective of the PEARS project led by Professor Fionnuala McAuliffe of UCD School of Medicine and the Perinatal Research Centre. PEARS – pregnancy, exercise and nutrition – supported by a specifically designed smartphone app called Hollestic (from Holles Street, the National Maternity Hospital, where the app was developed) helps women make good diet and lifestyle choices while pregnant.

PREGNANCY APP

Impact Diabetes B2B is a €4m EU-funded project on weight management during and after pregnancy. Dr Sharleen O’Reilly, who is based at UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science, will lead the combined input from UCD School of Medicine, UCD Institute of Food and Health and UCD Perinatal Research Centre. Central to the project is Bump2Baby&Me, an app that helps mums manage their own health and encourages them to eat well and be active.

■ www.ucd.ie/research

A WORLD OF TROUBLE

We are pushing nature to its limit. We are pushing population to its limits. We are pushing communities to their limits. We are stressing the environment. We are creating the conditions in which epidemics flourish. We are forcing people to migrate away from their homes because of climate stress. We are in a world of trouble.

We have allowed viruses that originated in the animal world to sustain transmission in humans by the manner in which we live. Our fates are intertwined with the animals that serve us and sustain us. But if we look at infectious diseases over the last number of decades, 75 per cent originate from the animal kingdom. We are part of a very complex biome, an ecosystem that is delicately balanced. If we continue to keep affecting it negatively as we do, we drive disease emergence. We are serial offenders, continually creating opportunity after opportunity for viruses and bacteria to exploit new means of survival. We must work on building a healthier world by investing in the quality of our health systems, including those in the developed world that are weakest. We must address inequity in the distribution of medicines including vaccines. We need to maintain the issue of mismanagement of our environment on top of the political agenda. We need radical change and for radical change to be driven by the G7, the G20, the UN General Assembly and all governments.

For those of us in the academic, health and scientific communities, we have a responsibility. We must be scientists AND activists. Citizens must speak up. What threatens our future is an emerging disease that takes our children and our parents. While we are in the eye of the storm of this pandemic, we feel the urgency, we acknowledge the threat. But, once the immediate danger is removed, we have a great capacity to move on, to forget trauma and to go back to the old ways. My colleagues tell me I am an eternal optimist and I am eternally hopeful that we will keep the healthy world agenda on the table. If we don’t change now, when in god’s name will we?

– Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director, Health Emergencies Programme, WHO

ONE HEALTH

The current pandemic highlights the intersection of human, animal and environmental health, as happened with HIV/AIDS and recent influenza pandemics. The tools for preparedness are the same: enhanced community, national and global surveillance; empowering and involving communities from the outset; and rapidity and agility in our collective response. Our response should always be underpinned by research and innovation, collaboration nationally and internationally and clear communication to the public. Pandemics have an impact beyond human health and therefore our response needs to be cross-sectoral given the short- and long-term impact on our society and our economy.

UCD plays a key role in leading on human and veterinary medical and scientific research that informs policy that promotes One Health in Ireland and beyond. Pandemics disproportionally impact on the most vulnerable and marginalised in our society. As a global university, our strong voices need to advocate for equity – without this, pandemics smoulder. Over the past 18 months, I have witnessed Ireland’s contribution to the scientific understanding of a pandemic, and the country’s ability to call on its diaspora and alumni to share knowledge, exchange ideas and collaborate in research and innovation, to rally together for the greater good of our society.

– Professor Mary Horgan, President, RCPI; Chair, NIAC

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

Climate change has resulted in wildfires around the world.

Concern about the need to protect our environment has become central to every facet of our lives – social, economic and political – with a recent survey demonstrating that 87 per cent of adults in Ireland recognise the importance of the environment as an asset for our country. And while we are faced with very significant environmental challenges, this level of awareness and concern is potentially powerful, and this positivity should be harnessed in the protection of our environment – and the need for action is urgent.

Ireland has enduring challenges in relation to water and air quality, biodiversity loss, resource efficiency, underdeveloped transport infrastructure, urbanisation pressures, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, unsustainable production and consumption practices and in our response to climate change – the defining challenge of our age.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides new and important insights and the steps needed to halt human-induced climate change. For Ireland it emphasises the imperative for the next decade to be one of major advances in our response, including a significant acceleration in the scale and pace of GHG emission reductions. This will require far reaching transformative change across the economy and society. Research will play an increasingly important role to inform the required policy interventions showing how – together – we can manage the impacts of climate change as we make the necessary transitions in a just and equitable way.

– Dr Tom Ryan, Director, Office of Environmental Enforcement, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Ireland

COMMENDABLE SOLIDARITY

The COVID-19 pandemic brought major challenges for Ireland and our health services. The resilience and adaptability that the Irish people and our health services have shown during this difficult time are qualities that we should be immensely proud of. As Irish people we can expect to live, disability-free, for longer and more of us can expect to live longer after a cancer diagnosis than ever before. Despite this we know our health and social care services need significant improvement. In this decade the Sláintecare plan will bring a health and social care system where everyone has access to services they need. A focus on lifelong wellbeing, prevention of illness and reducing health inequalities are at the core of this.

A multisectoral response is required to overcome the challenges of climate change and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). As we include climate change considerations into existing health programmes it is important to incorporate health as a key consideration in other sectors. Many of the health threats posed by climate change are inherently linked to threats posed in other sectors. The serious and increasing threat of AMR requires a whole of government approach, and the National Interdepartmental AMR Consultative Committee has set out an ambitious, multisectoral and comprehensive plan to tackle AMR in Ireland. Ireland has shown its many strengths in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and this gives me confidence in our ability to overcome the many challenges we will face this decade.

– Dr Tony Holohan, Chief Medical Officer, Ireland

SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS

Ireland has a rich history in, and a global reputation for, producing safe and traceable food. But to protect people and the planet, and to live up to that reputation, we need to ensure that our food is produced in a truly sustainable way.

The Government has recently approved the publication of a new strategy for the agri-food sector: Food Vision 2030 – A World Leader in Sustainable Food Systems. The strategy aims to deliver a climate-neutral food system by 2050, with verifiable progress achieved by 2030. It encompasses emissions reductions; carbon sequestration; improvements in air quality; restoration and enhancement of biodiversity; improvements in water quality; development of diverse forests; enhanced seafood sustainability; and an exploration of the potential of the bioeconomy.

This is the first time that environmental measures have been central to an agri-food sector plan. It is also explicit that the strategy must adjust in order to meet the ambitions set out in the Climate Action Plan, which will be launched later this year. This new approach must encourage a new generation of farmers and foresters to work the land in a sustainable way, with nature being restored, water quality improving, and premium prices being delivered for high-quality sustainable produce. In September, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres will convene a Food Systems Summit, which will focus global attention on the need to transform how we produce, process, consume and think about food. Ireland can and should be a leader in this area. To do this, we must ensure that our own actions are as good as our words.

– Eamon Ryan TD, Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications

KEEP THE ECONOMY WORKING

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought immense challenges around the world. The economic crisis accompanying it cannot end until the public health crisis does. From an economic perspective, the impact of COVID-19 has been somewhat unique. The way people have had to limit their daily lives has had serious consequences for businesses that rely on face-to-face contact and for workers who are unable to work remotely. However, those who have been able to work and conduct business online have had a different experience.

The actions by governments and central banks around the world, including in Ireland, have provided crucial economic support over the past year or so. This action depended greatly on economic resilience built up after the global financial crisis. Resilience is built in good times to be drawn upon when needed. And there is no doubt that resilience will be needed to meet future challenges, both the ones we can already identify like climate change and an ageing population, and others that are not yet apparent. In the years ahead, some difficult choices must be made to ensure our economy can meet these challenges and ensure that we live in a healthy world in the future.

– Sharon Donnery Deputy Governor, Central Bank of Ireland

RESEARCH IMPACT

Here at UCD Institute of Food and Health, we recently launched our strategy 2020- 2024. Mirroring the University’s Rising to the Future strategy, our core food and health activities are relevant to UCD’s four strategic themes.

In terms of Building a Healthy World, our research is poised to make a significant impact by developing sustainable food systems from an economic, environmental and societal perspective. We will continue to generate knowledge on how new approaches to food production systems and food consumption can benefit both the environment and human health. We will empower humanity by helping society make better dietary choices to enhance health and wellbeing.

We launched our strategy against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, which has amplified the importance of a resilient food system and public awareness of the link between diet and health. As we learn to live with the virus, these, and other factors such as Brexit, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Ireland’s agri-food strategy Food Vision 2030 – A World Leader in Sustainable Food Systems, will drive our research agenda over the next decade.

Cognisant of the challenges and opportunities that may arise, we will be agile in our response, aiming to lead the way in future-proofing Irish and global food systems to enhance health.

– Professor Dolores O’Riordan, Vice-President for Global Engagement, Director, UCD Institute of Food and Health

PLANET UNDER THREAT

During the COVID-19 restrictions, we have had to refocus and find enjoyment in some of the simpler things on our doorstep. Many of us have realised how valuable to our mental and physical health it can be just to walk in an enduring natural or semi-natural environment, with trees, wildflowers, birds, pollinators and views over land or sea. We have appreciated the calming and uplifting effect this can have.

Healthy ecosystems and landscapes are not a given. They are threatened by a potent combination of climate change and more localised pressures. We need to work actively to maintain, conserve and restore them and this requires political will and resources. Though researchers have measured their benefits for our health and wellbeing, these can be difficult to fully capture, and so they have not always been properly considered in arguments for a greater prioritisation of environmental stewardship.

The UCD Earth Institute is well placed to foster research to more fully characterise these kinds of benefits, and the threats to them, to inform policy and practical solutions. It brings together scientists, social scientists, engineers, landscape architects and humanities researchers with specialists in business, policy and governance within and outside UCD and allows them collaborate with each other and form connections with other public and private organisations. The Institute also promotes and supports public engagement and educational initiatives such as UCD’s new BSc in Sustainability, to help ensure the next generation can work more effectively towards a healthier future for our environment and ourselves.

– Professor Tasman Crowe, Director, UCD Earth Institute

HUMAN AND ANIMAL WELLBEING

The College of Health and Agricultural Sciences was established to exploit synergies that exist across the One Health spectrum. The One Health initiative links the health of all living things together with the existing synergies between human and animal health, public health and food and environmental science.

The College’s commitment to Building a Healthy World is reflected in its vision to lead the advancement of human, animal and environmental wellbeing for the benefit of society. Every day across the College faculty, researchers and professional staff work together to deliver impactful education, research and services in health, wellbeing and agriculture. This was never more apparent than in the last 18 months, when researchers from across the College were at the forefront of Ireland’s pandemic response.

The College aims to deliver major benefits to society and contribute to resolving global challenges in health, agriculture and the environment through the range of core disciplines within its constituent Schools. Collectively the Schools within the College provide a holistic education experience that challenges students to enquire, create, reason and innovate so they can go forward to achieve not only personal success, but shape local and global society.

New knowledge is at the heart of what a university is and the College is strongly committed to excellence in research and innovation. In creating an outstanding base of scholarship within all our disciplines, we deliver knowledge and ideas that inform policy, support enterprise, deliver innovation and enrich society to support the building of a healthy world.

– Professor Cecily Kelleher, Principal, UCD College of Health and Agricultural Sciences

IF IT ISN’T SAFE, IT ISN’T FOOD

Ireland is justly proud of its food safety record; however, many countries are not so fortunate. The World Health Organization found that, globally, the health burden of foodborne disease is comparable to malaria, tuberculosis and HIV-AIDs – the so-called ‘big three’. Despite this food safety has been relatively neglected in the development agenda.

People are notoriously poor at estimating risks. There is a saying in food safety that “what makes you sick and kills you and what you worry about are not the same”. For example, people often worry more about flying in planes than driving cars, yet statistically the latter is much more dangerous. So, what food safety challenges should we worry about? Many think chemicals in highly processed food coming from industrial farming systems and sold in massive, impersonal supermarkets. In fact, nearly all the world’s burden of foodborne disease comes from fresh foods sold in traditional markets produced by smallholders in developing countries.

Until now, there have been few food safety interventions in this highest-risk population. And those that have been done, have often made things worse. But research carried out by myself and colleagues in Africa has more promise. It relies on market-based, incentive-driven interventions using appropriate technology. One day, all the world may enjoy food as safe as Ireland.

– Professor Delia Randolph, Veterinary Epidemiologist

CHILDREN ARE THE FUTURE

“Your health is your wealth” and “a healthy nation is a wealthy nation” are two well-known sayings but two known facts are the first 1,000 days of a child’s life greatly influence their adult life and children make up 25 per cent of Ireland’s citizens. These facts influenced Government’s policy “Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures”, which includes developing a single national academic digital children’s hospital. This Government-approved health policy was made in 2006 when I was Deputy Chief Executive at St James’s Hospital and was involved in its submission to locate this new hospital on that campus. It made me acutely aware of the real benefits this investment will make in the health of future generations. Investment in a new hospital building, digital healthcare systems, modern equipment and specialist healthcare professionals means that in the future:

• Fewer children will leave Ireland for specialist care currently only available abroad.
• All paediatric specialist services will be under one roof and children will not have to go to different hospitals for treatment.
• Having 100 per cent single in-patient rooms means care is managed even during a pandemic.
• Valuable healthcare staff will have facilities and resources to deliver better healthcare to the sickest patients from one quarter of Ireland’s population.

– Ms Eilish Hardiman, Group Chief Executive, Children’s Health Ireland

NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASE WE CAN ADDRESS

Active detection and treatment programmes are key.

Lessons must be learnt from the linear relationship between increasing body weight and poor outcome in those who developed COVID-19 infection. After age, increasing body weight was the most significant determinant of poor outcome.

The single biggest barrier to addressing the problem is the deeply ingrained bias against people living with obesity. The false beliefs that body weight is an individual’s choice and that ‘eat less, move more’ is the treatment for obesity remain widely held. We do not tell people with malignant melanoma to put on sunscreen and wear a hat as their treatment. Prevention of disease is different from treatment of disease. Both are vital for obesity.

The recently approved HSE Model of Care for overweight and obesity highlights the three key steps that need to be addressed:

• Acknowledge the fact of obesity as the commonest chronic disease today.
• Develop and evaluate strategies to increase physical activity and reduce intake of highly processed, energy dense nutrients.
• Implement active detection and treatment programmes that will destigmatise the disease and minimise the complications of obesity.

Implementation of the Model could see Ireland establish a roadmap for other countries in a battle that currently no country is winning.

– Professor Donal O’Shea, Consultant, St Vincent’s Hospital

READING THIS EDITION of UCD Connections, I am struck by a line written by alumnus Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of WHO Health Emergencies Programme, “For those of us in the academic, health and scientific communities, we have a responsibility”.

Part of that responsibility is to help build a healthy world. This agenda stretches beyond research into diseases and advances in healthcare, into food supply and safe water, and crosses into environmental spheres that cause climate change and impact on society. Before the COVID-19 pandemic we had identified Building a Healthy World as one of our strategic themes in our UCD Strategy 2020-2024: Rising to the Future. The health of all living things on Earth is intimately connected and must be considered at multiple levels. UCD is the only Irish university that brings together human and animal health sciences, agriculture and food sciences, and environmental and social sciences and we are uniquely positioned to address the education and research synergies across these disciplines. UCD, through our faculty and our alumni, seeks to advance human, animal and environmental health and wellbeing for the benefit of all society. In this issue of UCD Connections, Building a Healthy World gives you a sense of the wide-ranging work being carried out by the UCD community towards this global objective.

Over the past year, we have continued to teach and to research. But, of course, COVID-19 restrictions have meant that many students and staff could not come to campus and therefore lost out on that wonderful campus experience. There is a palpable sense of energy and excitement as we plan for a return to campus life with the prospect of spontaneous interactions and social gatherings. I was delighted to be able to get my second vaccination at UCD O’Reilly Hall, one of the Health Service Executive’s vaccination centres in Dublin. The steady stream of people coming here is a testament to the very high vaccination uptake in Ireland.

We know that the nature of this pandemic means that national governments have to react and respond to surge waves and we will continue to comply with all public health directives. In this issue, you will read how 26 current and former UCD students represented Ireland at the Tokyo Olympics this summer. The enjoyment they gave to everyone back home – despite the time difference – almost compensated for fans not being there. UCD has always provided support for elite athletes so that they can be dedicated to their sport while also maintaining their studies. The much-anticipated opening of the new running track, funded by a generous donation from an alumnus, will add to the excellent sports facilities for on-campus training and competition. While these facilities are used by high-performance sports students, they are also available to all students and help us to live up to our healthy lifestyle ethos.

While campus seemed quiet over the past year in terms of the number of people here – we dropped from a daily population of over 17,000 to around 3,000 – progress was being made with our Future Campus development plans. Construction of the Centre for Creativity and the Centre for Future Learning commenced. Phase 1 of the new student residences at Roebuck was completed. UCD is fulfilling its promise in Rising to the Future to provide worldclass academic facilities and student amenities that enable everyone in the UCD community achieve their potential and contribute to a better society.

Many alumni joined us throughout the year for online events or strolled around Belfield to visit the outdoor exhibitions. As we look forward to this academic year, I hope that we will meet in person and come together for reunions or, more informally, at the UCD University Club.

strategy.ucd.ie

AN UNASSUMING BUILDING tucked away in the heart of the UCD campus has been at the centre of Ireland’s efforts to curb the spread of Covid-19.

This year’s unprecedented pandemic has thrust the National Virus Reference Laboratory (NVRL) into public prominence and turned its director, Dr Cillian de Gascun, into a regular fixture in the media.

Aside from processing its own tests for the virus, at the time of writing, the NVRL has overseen a massive expansion of testing capacity across over 40 laboratories nationwide, designed to quickly identify flare-ups of the disease. As head of the Government’s expert advisory group on the pandemic, and a key member of the National Public Health Emergency Team  (NPHET), Dr de Gascun has played a central role in formulating policy throughout the crisis.

The NVRL’s vital part in the pandemic is far from the only UCD link over recent months. Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan is a graduate of the University. Further afield, the head of emergencies at the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Michael Ryan, was a postgraduate on the campus before starting his career as an international infectious diseases “firefighter”. Stephen Donnelly, Minister for Health since July, is a graduate of the University, as is Dr Ronan Glynn, Acting Chief Medical Officer.

Talking to Dr de Gascun on a warm, early summer day, with the disease seemingly in check and a national testing system in place, there is finally time to reflect on what has been an astonishing year so far. “For most of the time, it was the busiest I’ve ever been in work. I’d get home and just fall asleep, it was so exhausting,” he says.

At the height of the crisis, when the number of Covid-19 cases was doubling every few days, NPHET meetings would be called “at the drop of a hat,” he says. “There might be three or four in a week, and one late in the evening. You’d do a full day’s work, then go into NPHET for two or three hours. The days were very long.”

There were multiple challenges in building up a comprehensive testing system at short notice – an initial lack of capacity, shortages of vital materials for the process, difficulties in marrying different pieces of equipment and global competition for scarce supplies.

“It was stressful at times. We’re normally busy with our work but in a controlled way. We know winter can be busy with the flu season but we can get through that.”

But as the pandemic took off, “the corridors were full of boxes of samples and our guys were working 14-hour days, yet the piles at the end of the day were as big as at the start.” Initially, tests were being carried out at a rate of 30 a day, and over 470 tests were done before the first positive was recorded in late February. The laboratory increased capacity to 1,500 in response to the surge in cases, but even then up to 8,000 people daily were seeking tests. “Right from the get go we were playing catch-up because there was no spare capacity,” de Gascun recalls. “It  was a learning experience.”

Aside from processing its own tests for the virus, the NVRL has overseen a massive expansion of testing capacity across over 40 laboratories nationwide, designed to quickly identify flare-ups of the disease …

“Looking back, I wonder how we did it,” NVRL laboratory manager Deirdre Burke tells me. “It was a case of all hands on deck and there was great camaraderie. It was also a very proud time for us, even though we were exhausted.”

The laboratory also had to field a  large number of calls, many from people anxiously awaiting test results – there were 91,000 calls in April alone. UCD’s Contact Tracing Centre, led by UCD alumni, Professor Patrick Wall and Associate Professor Mary Codd, lent a helping hand here. “We couldn’t have done it without them,” says Burke. “And they were all volunteers; we were so grateful for the time they gave us.”

The laboratory was re-organised to work seven-day weeks, twelve hours a day, but it was decided to split the staff into two non- overlapping teams under de Gascun and deputy director Dr Lilian Rajan in order to minimise the risk of operations being interrupted due to infection. Thankfully, de Gascun says, this never happened.

… a national system was created that is capable of delivering 15,000 results a day.

The NVRL was set up in 1963 … to cement the success of new vaccination programmes and to coordinate Ireland’s contribution to the surveillance of infectious diseases internationally.

To meet the massive demand for testing, a network of hospital labs was pressed into service to process samples, but the game- changer was when Enfer, a private-sector lab in Co Kildare, signed up.

Veterinary testing is Enfer’s normal speciality but UCD academics such as Professor Wall, who sits on its scientific advisory board, realised the lab’s massive capacity could make a winning difference during the pandemic.“We met them on St Patrick’s Day and within 24 hours of an agreement they had local builders on site to set up the lab,” recalls UCD alumna, Dr Suzi Coughlan, NVRL principal clinical scientist, who was centrally involved in building up the partnership.“We couldn’t have done it without them. In the public sector, you are often restricted in what you can do, for example in relation to HR or procurement, so you can’t always move with the speed you need,” she says.

Coughlan says she was impressed by the ease with which the necessary clinical oversight was put in place. “They were well used to having inspectors in from the Department of Agriculture, so there was no problem. A partnership that would have taken years to develop, on paper, was set up very quickly.”

The UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research and its network were also central to the response to the Covid-19 crisis. Conway Fellow, Dr Nicola Fletcher, who recently joined UCD as an Ad Astra Fellow in UCD School of Veterinary Medicine, became involved in training technicians for the new testing facility at Enfer. Dr Fletcher trains the undergraduate student technicians in how to work safely with the potentially live virus, which must be inactivated in the first step of the diagnostic test.

With Enfer’s 6,500-a-day test capacity – capable of being boosted to 9,000 a day – there was now enough capacity in the system to ensure suspected virus cases would be tested quickly.

With some bridging help from a German lab, a national system was created that is capable of delivering 15,000 results a day. And while the NVRL is now processing  only a proportion of Ireland’s Covid-19 tests, it maintains a vital oversight function spanning laboratories nationwide.

Ironically, demand for testing fell away as Ireland effectively suppressed the virus in the early summer. The number of cases has been on the rise again since late July, but public health doctors are confident there is sufficient capacity in the system to cater for any fresh surge in demand.

From Templeogue in south Dublin, de Gascun studied medicine in Trinity College, receiving a Doctor of Medicine from UCD and specialising in clinical microbiology and virology after further training in the UK.

“It was HIV that got me interested in this field,” he recalls. “I left school in the early 1990s and remember being fascinated by HIV. It wasn’t just an infection, there was fear, stigmatisation. There was the celebrity thing as well – Freddie Mercury, Anthony Perkins, Magic Johnson. I was intrigued by HIV, and the way it would infect and integrate into its host genome.”

The NVRL was set up in 1963 to conduct poliovirus and influenza surveillance in Ireland, cement the success of new vaccination programmes, and to coordinate Ireland’s contribution to the surveillance of infectious diseases internationally. Professor Patrick Meenan, an eminent microbiologist based at UCD, was involved in establishing the NVRL and had brought Ireland into the global influenza surveillance network in the early 1950s. Prior to Covid-19, most of the laboratory’s caseload was diagnostic testing, but it also carries out reference work such as checking whether the content of flu vaccines is a good match for the flu strains actually circulating at a particular time. Ante-natal and sexual health tests are also important areas of work; before the pandemic, the laboratory was processing almost one million tests a year.

Along with 140 other centres around the world, the NVRL submits national data on influenza, measles, rubella, polio and other infectious diseases to the WHO.

The laboratory is funded by invoicing the HSE for tests carried out, though its 116 staff are University employees.

Through being on the UCD campus, the NVRL benefits from academic linkages – for example, with UCD School of Public Health (Physiotherapy and Sport Science) and School of Veterinary Medicine – while functions such as HR or finance are taken care of by the University.

De Gascun describes his frequent media appearances as “the strangest thing” during the crisis. “I usually have one [media appearance] per year, at flu time. The level of scrutiny on your work, and on your words, was new to me. But it’s part of the role; after all, there aren’t that many virologists around. I got a lot of the media attention when in fact the people doing the testing on a daily basis were the staff downstairs. That’s where the real work was done and where people stepped up to the challenge, as I knew they would.”

Meanwhile, UCD alumnus and Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan became the public face of the crisis through his  daily pronouncements at NPHET briefings.

Dr Holohan, who studied medicine in UCD between 1985 and 1991 and has subsequent qualifications in child health and public health from UCD, points out that “things like this come around every few years – though nothing on this scale”.

He recalls how, in his first week as Chief Medical Officer in 2008, a controversy blew up over dioxin contamination of pork.

However, the response from society during Covid-19 has been “completely unprecedented”, he says.

“We’ve had a tiny experience in terms of mortality and impact on the health service compared to what we might have had. This is an unattenuated epidemic sweeping through a naive population.

“We would have had tens of thousands of cases every day [without restrictions] but as it is we still haven’t had 30,000 cases. I know that’s a big number, but the population is another big number.”

In his briefings early in the pandemic, Dr Holohan acknowledged where mistakes were made, while insisting Ireland has performed well in international terms. “Everyone who tells you they know what they’re doing in every respect in relation to this is not being truthful. There’s a big part of ‘let’s try this, and see how it goes’.”

While Dr Holohan became a familiar media figure, you are likely to have seen another UCD alumnus, Dr Michael Ryan, on televisions across the world. As Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, Dr Ryan has effectively become the global spokesman for the UN organisation’s efforts to contain and treat Covid-19.

In regular media briefings from the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Dr Ryan has delivered the latest news about fighting the virus to an expectant world. In doing so, he has shown a knack for pithily, and sometimes bluntly, summarising the challenges involved – reminding countries, for example, of the need to “test, test, test” for the disease while never letting “the perfect be the enemy of the good” in their efforts.

From the Sligo/Mayo border, Dr Ryan studied for a masters in public health in UCD after completing medical training in NUI Galway. A boots-on-the-ground type of operator, he has worked in many disease hotspots over the years, including in frontline roles fighting SARS, polio and Ebola, before taking up his current role.

Since this article was prepared, the fears of scientists have been realised with a resurgence in virus cases. This has forced a delay in the planned easing of some restrictions.

“It’s hard to envisage a situation where it doesn’t come back in the winter …

De Gascun, though, is optimistic for the future, while stressing the need to build more testing capacity into our systems as well as an efficient surveillance mechanism to spot new outbreaks. “It’s hard to envisage a situation where it doesn’t come back in the winter to some degree. I think we’ll be better prepared though, and we’ll benefit from physical distancing.”

“We have learned a lot,” Burke adds. “The testing equipment and the IT links are all there now. So we would be ready to do it all again and probably better.”

TEXT Paul Cullen
PHOTOGRAPHS Simon Watson

UPON MOVING OUT to Belfield in 1969 and into UCD’s new Arts Building, the Dean of Commerce Professor James Meenan wrote in his diary of the peacefulness of this growing University place, just three miles outside Dublin city centre: “Belfield looked enchanting and it is so heartening to think of what it will look like when the buildings are finished and the grass and shrubs and trees begin to grow. [The students] are deeply fortunate … to be young in such a place. We should produce good people indeed in future years …”

Meanwhile, in less bucolic terms, UCD’s Gentle Revolution was running its course in the urban setting of the overcrowded Earlsfort Terrace buildings. And Donogh O’Malley’s Trinity/UCD merger proposal of 1966 had only just been put to bed.

The merger plan had been spurred on, of course, by the growing accommodation needs of these Dublin universities. By the 1960s, the Irish higher education sector had been so neglected that radical reform was required and UCD, as Ireland’s largest university, was at the centre of this process. UCD’s accommodation crisis had already been put under the lens through a government enquiry (1959) so that the making of a new university campus at Belfield, following the controversial decision to leave Dublin city centre, might be read as a microcosm of 1960s Ireland. It represented suburbanisation and physical change, national ambition and internationalist aspiration.

This year, in 2020 and ongoing through 2021, UCD is celebrating this history with a series of events and reflections. Taking the architectural story as the central thread, Belfield 50 sets out to better understand the University’s development and its culture across the 50+ years of campus design.

Belfield is a landscaped campus of varying architectures comprising concrete Brutalism, timber and brick contextualism as well as shiny glass and metal.

Beginning with the amassing of landscaped estates in the Stillorgan area of South County Dublin, from 1933 but particularly through the 1950s, UCD’s growth and history at this site has been brave and clear-sighted. First came the new Science Buildings from 1962 to 1964, which, designed by former Professor of Architecture, J V Downes, were the first modernist university buildings in the state. This structure brought pioneering scientific research facilities and was followed quickly by the 1963 international architectural competition for the University’s masterplan, won by a young Polish architect, Andrzej Wejchert. The international nature of the competition pointed to UCD’s outward direction. It attracted 105 designs from over 20 countries, including designs from leading experimental architects such as Shadrach Woods (Candilis-Josic-Woods) and Giancarlo de Carlo. Only one of the ten Irish submissions was premiated or commended – Stephenson Gibney Associates came fourth.

Andrzej Wejchert’s winning design proposed a low-lying unified group of modernist buildings, held to a spine or covered walkway. Ultimately, the masterplan’s attraction lay in its openness to adaptation and in its elasticity and apparent flexibility. To his masterplan complex of walkway and structures for administration and the arts, law and commerce, were added a modernist restaurant and a monumental library. Both Belfield’s new restaurant and library were by other architects; a key feature of Belfield was to be its many architectural signatures. Then came Wejchert’s water tower and his handsome sports centre; and at the same time, about 1980, the Agriculture building, designed by Patrick Rooney, was opened, to complete phase one of Belfield’s construction.

The campus has not stopped evolving. As the architecture strayed from Wejchert’s axis by the 1990s, other brave and interesting buildings were made and today, Belfield is a landscaped campus of varying architectures comprising concrete Brutalism, timber and brick contextualism as well as shiny glass and metal corporate entities. Set amidst a maturing landscape, new disciplinary centres for research and teaching emerge. And as the future campus begins to unfold with the planned Centre for Creativity (Stephen Holl Architects) and the Centre for Learning (RKD), it is timely to reflect on Belfield’s creation. It seems right now to consider the value of what UCD has built and how this campus architecture has contributed to and enabled the life of UCD over the past 50+ years.

The central elements of Belfield 50 are an exhibition and a collection of essays, Making Belfield: Space and Place at UCD. New research coming from UCD’s extensive library and cultural collections, combines with archive photography, footage and recent interviews. What emerges is the striking resonances between Wejchert’s vision for Belfield and Cardinal (Saint) John Henry Newman’s idea of a university: both sought an infrastructure for chance encounter to enable the exchange of ideas and to harbour the individual. Undoubtedly, Belfield campus achieves this for UCD.

www.ucd.ie/belfield50
TEXT Dr Ellen Rowley

MAKING BELFIELD: AN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

Making Belfield: Space + Place at UCD, by Finola O’Kane and Ellen Rowley, will be published in late September. If you would like to order a copy of the book, and to avail of the special alumni rate of €25 including p&p, email ucdpress@ucd.ie

Click to enlarge

10. Urban Institute, Richview Campus, 2002: Designed by Grafton Architects as a research centre for urban issues, this inter-institutional building was expressed in terracotta tiled walls, plinth and idiosyncratic roof lights.

Arts Building Courtyard, 1970: The Newman Building is an architecture of systems, from anodised bronze glazing to striped horizonal concrete panels which hold ducts containing heating pipes, electrical trunking, slots for fresh air intake and the safety track for window cleaning. Wejchert sought the whitest concrete using Wicklow granite and quartzite aggregate, always emphasising the horizontal elements.

Perspective drawing of Engineering Building and University Industry Centre, 1989 (Scott Tallon Walker (STW) Architects.

“THERE IS A big wave approaching,” says Colm Lyon, founder and chief executive of Fire.com. “We know it’s coming, we just don’t know how far away from the shore it is.”

Lyon, who graduated with a BComm from UCD in 1985, is used to catching big waves. In 2015, he sold Realex Payments for €115m. Now, with payments and financial services company Fire, he is hoping to build something even bigger.

The wave he talks about is the cashless economy – but not just living without notes and coins, but a whole ecosystem of businesses and services with frictionless, mobile-facilitated payments at their core.

Paying electronically, Lyons says, is a faster, safer way of doing business that will unlock new opportunities as it collapses the traditional walls of commerce and payments. “It’s a beautiful way to pay and it’s a superb way to get paid,” he says. “These are really fundamental improvements in the underlying infrastructure and the underlying attributes of how payments are going to work into the future.”

Around the world, and in Ireland, the numbers tell their own story. Emerging Asian countries are expected to see non- cash transactions grow by 29 per cent by next year; electronic payments make up 80 per cent of transactions in Sweden. Between February and May of this year alone, there was a seven per cent increase in the number of contactless payments per day in Ireland, with 19.1 million occurring every day.

On the ground, this is driving growth for businesses like Colin Barry’s. The UCD Business alumnus is founder of Brite Mobility, an e-scooter and e-bike sharing platform, aimed at making modern cities quickly and easily navigable for its users.

Barry knows all about rapid change. His family’s company, MotorPark, was the oldest Ford dealer in Europe, and had contracts with BMW and Mitsubishi as well. But by the end of 2018, the Barrys knew change was coming. The business was sold to Joe Duffy and Sheils Motors, and two years later, Barry is still in transport – but now, it’s a fundamentally different movement.

“We can’t run this business without being online, without it being an app. It’s not possible. Online apps bring an ability to create a networked, social, easy-to-use way of accessing transport devices or vehicles,” he says. “At it’s core, it’s about a service that allows you to find the device, start the device, travel on it, and pay for the trip, all done on your phone.”

For several years, the cashless economy has been growing at a steady pace, with the Covid-19 pandemic now locking in and accelerating this dynamic.

What will this future look like?

The explosion of the cashless economy has ushered in a new set of challenges for operators and regulators

A New Frontier

Experts in the field, like UCD graduate Laura Flood, a partner with PwC and a Council Member of the Fintech and Payments Association of Ireland, say that the move towards a cashless society is fuelled by several overlapping and reinforcing trends.

For Flood, it is “primarily driven by advances in technology, the development of new and innovative efficient payment solutions, and consumer preferences”.

“Speed, convenience and reducing the risk of theft of physical cash are also some of the key reasons we are seeing a marked reduction in cash transactions,” she says. Her work brings her into contact with the whole range of financial services companies making sense of this shift, from major domestic and international banks to “fintechs” – or financial technology companies – looking to disrupt their bigger, older brothers in the pillar lenders. The success of these interlopers goes a long way to explaining what is valued, and valuable, in this new economy.

Katherine Farrell has worked in communications with Web Summit since completing her BComm International at UCD in 2015, and that has brought her into contact with the firms trying to break new ground in the space. Fintech firms that have been attending Web Summit, and its sister conference Collision, have been “growing immensely” in recent months, she says, “purely by recognising what customers want in their financial journeys: access, speed, price and security.”

So-called “digital social payment” companies like Revolut, AliPay and Venmo “remove barriers such as paying in cash, forgetting to pay your pal, and owing someone money. They’re instant, so when friends are sitting having dinner they can immediately split a bill with far less hassle.”

On the ground, the last few years have seen rapid change. Counterintuitively, when he moved to Silicon Valley in 2011, Ger Dwyer found the digital infrastructure around him to be outdated and archaic.

The UCD BComm alumnus joined Google from Eircom in 2006, and now is chief financial officer of Waymo, the search giant’s driverless car venture. But, when he arrived to take up his new role at Mountain View, phone networks were frustrating, the traditional taxi network was “maddening”, and even as late as 2016, paying for services with Google Pay on his phone was “so awkward”.

In a few short years, that scene has been transformed by services like Google Pay and companies like Uber. When someone is leaving the office, the whip-around is done on Google Pay, not in an envelope, while a circle of Irish tech executives in Silicon Valley swap tips on the best currency exchange apps and services to use to circumvent the significant charges imposed by traditional banks. All this, Dwyer explains, has been accelerated by Covid-19, as consumer behaviours changed in ways that cut out the middle man and cut down on interactions. His wife, he says, now buys seafood directly from fishermen using digital wallet Venmo.

“That trend has been ongoing, the rise of the apps-based economy has certainly accelerated it, and now the pandemic is going to accelerate it even more.”

It’s a view shared by UCD alumnus Patrick Waldron, chief executive of international payments firm Planet. The company grew out of Galway- headquartered financial services firm Fintrax, which began life as a processor of VAT refunds for tourists. It now serves 400,000 merchants and manages transactions worth tens of billions every year. Recently, a sale worth up to €1.98bn was rumoured.

Pre-pandemic, around 70 per cent of customers wanted VAT refunds in cash. This has now plummeted to less than 20 per cent, Waldron says. And he is betting that this change will be permanent. “Once people get used to this type of behaviour, it tends to be sustained. I would think, without Covid-19, it would have taken another four or five years to make that change,” he says.

RISK AND RESPONSIBILITY

With rapid expansion, growing risk and responsibility comes along with a growing opportunity. The explosion of the cashless economy has ushered in a new set of challenges for operators and regulators, and risks to be recognised and managed by consumers.

Patrick Waldron says there is an onus on companies to be aware of emerging threats. “I would not underestimate the challenges for companies in making sure that they’re protected from cyber attacks, because we’ve seen a big increase in attacks in that area,” he says.

During the crisis, Waldron has seen more organised criminal elements involved in these incursions.

“In order to move to a fully cashless society, the financial sector’s digital products and services would need to allow for full participation by all members of society and enhance financial inclusion … ”

Web Summit’s Katherine Farrell says that while the 2008 financial crash caused many to lose trust in traditional financial services, and indirectly led to the rise of digital banks and decentralised digital currencies, the companies that win in the next phase of finance must be primed for risk.

“While customers demand convenience and speed from fintechs, security, safety from fraud, and privacy, are also major priorities. This is still an issue that hangs over massive payment companies such as PayPal, who dominate so many payment points across their portfolio,” she says.

Fintechs have enjoyed a windfall of customers during Covid-19, but “people are now being forced to use these payment systems, because we don’t have many other alternatives. It’s making consumers ask: ‘Are the same checks and balances in place with these larger payment companies?’

Where once there was a fear of the physical theft of cash, PwC’s Laura Flood says that fear has been transferred to online fraud and scams.

Flood also believes there is a need to ensure all members of society, not just tech-savvy digital natives, are catered for and have access to these new services and resources.“In order to move to a fully cashless society, the financial sector’s digital products and services would need to allow for full participation by all members of society and enhance financial inclusion with evidence-based design and transparency at the heart of progress in this area.”

These responsibilities aren’t just for companies and consumers to worry about. “For regulators, a world without cash presents some significant considerations,” says Flood. Designing monetary policy for stability and financial regulation as the use of cash declines and new innovations emerge will be a defining challenge for regulators.

“A number of forces, including these, have resulted in the concept of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) being widely explored by many Central Banks around the world to complement or replace traditional currencies. A recent Bank for International Settlements survey showed that more than 80 per cent of the 66 banks surveyed were working on CBDC, though many in an exploratory or ‘analytical’ phase,” says Flood.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in the area say not all areas of banking and lending will easily make the switch online. UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School alumna, Alison Fearon, formerly of Merrill nch and Goldman Sachs, last year founded Switcheroo.ie, which digitises the mortgage application process. “Payments of €50 or less are easy and low risk but other services are complicated and require advice,” she says.

“Financial services is rightly a highly regulated industry where advice for many areas is critical and will unlikely be digitised for some time. How comfortable would you be making the biggest financial decision of your life on the back of interacting with a chatbot?”

Technology, Fearon says, has an increasing role to play “but it needs to be considered and with the interest of the customer in mind, not digitisation for the sake of technology deployment.”

A BRAVE NEW WORLD

If these challenges can be bested, entrepreneurs in the sector – and consumers – can look forward to a radically changed and improved vista, with traditional lenders vulnerable to losing large swathes of their traditional markets to agile and fast-moving usurpers.

Katherine Farrell relates the experiences of two fintech innovators who have appeared at Web Summit in recent years. Revolut’s founder and CEO, Nikolay Storonsky, was at Web Summit in 2019. He said it would take 14 committees to approve one of his ideas at Credit Suisse, and two years to get one product to market. Anne Boden, chief executive of digital-only lender Starling Bank, says what would have taken years to build out in a legacy bank can be processed and shipped in weeks at a so-called “neobank”.

Colm Lyon is now largely focused on the UK, where he is on the Payments Products and Services board of trade industry body UK Finance, and the open banking future steering committee.

Lyon says the changes afoot now will collapse the traditional walls of commerce and payments. Soon, he says, consumers will be able to scan a real-life ad for a product on their phone, and pay directly through their banking app in a way that means their details will never have to be shared with a vendor.

“This is an electronic payment of monumental difference to what we have had before, because it’s cheaper for the retailer to accept that payment, it’s faster, it’s almost real time … there’s little or no fraud because I authenticate myself to my bank or to my account provider who is responsible for that and the retailer is not responsible for it,” he says. He calls it “open banking”.

PwC’s Laura Flood agrees. “Open finance is seen by many as the next stage of payment innovation and is based on the principle that the data supplied by and created on behalf of financial services customers are owned and controlled by those customers.”

Customers who consent to sharing data could be offered tailored products and services, including highly targeted quotations and personal financial management tools, as well as alternative creditworthiness assessments, according to Flood. “Open finance will present a significant opportunity for those seeking to develop innovative new services for products including mortgages, savings, pensions and insurance.”

TEXT: Jack Horgan-Jones

WHAT MAKES A UNIVERSITY work? Its people. So how can a university work when people cannot be on campus? That was the challenge facing UCD as the Covid-19 pandemic moved rapidly across the world, bringing with it the need for enormous societal changes to protect public health. Educators and students alike were forced to accept that in order to achieve together, they had to stay apart. But with thoughtful leadership, the right technology and a huge community response, UCD students, lecturers and staff have been going the distance to teach, learn and work.

The Covid-19 virus was identified and reported on in Wuhan, China, at the end of December 2019, and very soon after this the University was alerted to the potential global changes that the virus could bring, notes Professor Mark Rogers, UCD’s Registrar and Deputy President.

UCD has a presence in China through the Beijing-Dublin International College, which it runs in Beijing in partnership with Beijing University of Technology (BJUT).

“We had a forewarning from seeing what happened in February at our campus in China,” explains Professor Rogers. “This new disease had been reported a few weeks beforehand in Wuhan, and very suddenly the 1,000 UCD students in Beijing moved online for teaching and learning.”

Planning For Change

Even before that, senior management at UCD had been thinking about how to move its entire population of 17,000 undergraduate and 7,500 graduate students to distance teaching, learning and assessment should the need arise.

“We started to plan how we should organise ourselves, so that if the virus came to Ireland we would be in a position to act,” says Professor Jason Last, Dean of Students at UCD.

He chaired the Coronavirus Monitoring Group, which brought in expertise from across the University in communications, health and safety, student health and international students.

“We drew up a contingency plan and we monitored the situation,” says Professor Last, who is a medical doctor. “We conveyed the messages about handwashing and isolation, about wellbeing and what to do if staff or students were concerned, and we put in place protocols should a suspected case of Covid-19 arise on campus.”

Then, in mid-March, the shutters came down. “The Taoiseach announced that educational institutions were to close, and we knew educational activities would have to be done differently,” explains Professor Last. “We realised this was going to be a huge challenge – everyone was moving to working from home and working in new ways.”

UCD had recently updated the Virtual Learning Environment software platform, where students and staff can share materials online, he notes.

“Thankfully, the new platform is well suited for remote delivery at scale, so it was good to have that in place,” says Professor Last. “The other aspect was that the lockdown started during the fieldwork/study break in March, so we had a window to get distance teaching and learning up and running, and to consider how to continue to make our many student supports available at a distance whilst maintaining health supports for those students who were living on campus or nearby.”

Rapid Changes

Lecturers across the University sprang into action, preparing and delivering lectures online to students in real time, and recording and uploading lectures for students to watch when they could and responding to student queries.

Then came time for exams. In some cases, the assessments had changed from end-of-semester exams to assignments. And where exams happened, they were either “live” and timed, or students were given a deadline to submit.

Across the board, the distance teaching and learning approach needed latitude, notes Professor Last, who experienced delivering tutorials remotely during lockdown.

Like others, he has been largely working from home – Co Wexford in his case – and he appreciates that the change in setup can bring challenges.

“For this transition to distance working, we had to take into account that everyone across the entire body of staff, faculty and students would have bandwidth issues during this time,” he says.

“And by that I mean not only their immediate access to the Internet, but they may also have caring responsibilities in their families. Also, if a student moved home, perhaps there was little space for them to get a quiet corner. Then if they were an international student, they could now be in a completely different time-zone to Ireland. So while a live online lecture meant students had the opportunity to ask questions and enter into discussions, there were also cases where a recorded lecture was going to work better in practice.”

Technology At Scale

For Trish Mountjoy, ensuring that the underlying technology did its job to keep everyone connected during lockdown was top of her list. As Head of Educational Technology Services at UCD IT Services, she delivers technology solutions and services for the University as a whole. Before Covid-19 hit, she had been focused on getting the new Virtual Learning Environment bedded down, and ensuring that staff and students alike could use it.

“When the lockdown happened, we had five weeks of the teaching term left, followed then by an assessment period,” says Mountjoy. “But we were in a good position for that, because the Brightspace platform we had introduced is delivered as SaaS (software as a service), hosted in AWS (Amazon Web Services), so we knew the platform would have the capacity to scale and adjust to the increase in demand.”

With confidence that the system would cope with the surge during lockdown, Mountjoy and colleagues tried to keep the user-facing changes to a minimum. “We were reluctant to heap more technology into the mix,” she explains. “We wanted to keep things as consistent as we could and not introduce new elements, to help minimise the stress for both faculty and students.”

During the “emergency pivot to online”, IT Services worked with several other departments to ensure a seamless delivery of teaching and learning and assessments, all happening at scale. “During the live exams, which ran over three weeks, we had just over 40,000 sittings of exams run on the platform with very few difficulties,” says Mountjoy.

“We had to make the change to at-distance out of necessity and very rapidly. Now that people have some time to reflect, I hope there will be some positive experiences, and we can consider what additional aspects of technology- enhanced learning could be integrated into teaching and assessment in the future.”

Resilience and Response

For Professor Marie Clarke, Dean of Undergraduate Studies at UCD, the transition to working at a distance has highlighted the resilience of the UCD community.

“There has been a huge generosity among students and faculty and staff working together,” she says. “We also had the UCD Teaching and Learning Unit led by Áine Galvin, IT Services Support led by Trish Mountjoy and Genevieve D’Alton and Assessment led by Karen McHugh all bringing their perspectives and skills to the problem, and it made the support so much richer. Then the fact that all could be achieved in a virtual environment and at such speed was amazing.”

UCD students also stepped up to the plate, and the preliminary findings of a survey show they generally rated the University’s transition to distance teaching, learning and assessment highly. More than 5,200 UCD students responded to the survey, and Professor Clarke and Maura McGinn, Director of UCD Institutional Research, have been analysing the results.

The students’ answers highlighted some of the challenges they faced during the Covid-19 lockdown, including loneliness, anxiety, a difficulty in sustaining concentration and a lack of structure to their day. And while the majority of respondents would not undertake online learning by choice, the students were largely happy with the rapid response of their lecturers and just over half of the students now feel more comfortable with learning at a distance than they did before the pandemic. “Reflecting on the experience of transitioning to working at a distance means we can now figure out what works well for the future,” says Professor Clarke.

Look to the Future

And what might that future look like for UCD students, faculty and staff? With so much uncertainty baked into the global Covid-19 pandemic, anticipating the finer details of how UCD will operate in the coming academic year is not easy. But UCD Registrar Professor Rogers and colleagues want to ensure that people can have as much of an in-person experience at UCD as they can while keeping safe and healthy.

“It is likely that many lectures will remain at a distance, and small groups can be present on campus for discussions and practicals and in labs to carry out research, but in a manner that they can maintain social distancing,” says Professor Rogers. “We want to ensure that people can have as much of an engaged campus experience as possible while keeping safe and healthy.”

Text: Dr Claire O’Connell

THE SUPPORT WE receive from UCD alumni is extraordinary in its generosity, transformative in its impact, and deeply appreciated by the students who benefit directly and by the UCD staff who nurture their progress.

In this issue of UCD Connections, we bring you some insight into the difference your donations make to your University and to the young (and not so young) students following their journey through UCD. Last year alone, thanks to the incredible support of close to 4,000 alumni, we raised €10.36m in support of students, research and teaching facilities. I thank each and every one of you.

“Within the constraints of the national and public health guidelines, we strive to provide a real campus experience for our students, academically and socially”

Of course, since January, we have all been consumed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have lost friends, family and colleagues to this awful virus. Its impact has meant that our normal social interactions have been so curtailed that we have not been able to extend the normal personal sympathy and support to those who are grieving the loss of their loved ones – whether from Covid-19 or in other circumstances. Because so many of us have been affected, I know that we will rally, and, when the time is right, we will come together to share, commemorate and celebrate.

UCD has been very proud to play its part in tackling the impact of Covid-19  at a national level – through the work of staff, students and alumni – to such an extent that we have dedicated much of the magazine to their efforts.

Managing the impact of Covid-19 meant that last March we had to transfer all of our teaching, learning and assessment to remote delivery. As early as January we had to look after students in China or due to travel to China, so we had a level of preparedness for the massive impact when the virus hit Ireland. In addition to looking after the learning needs of our students, we also ensured that our on-campus residences remained open in order to support the hundreds of students who had no safe alternative.

Planning for the new academic year was, I will readily admit, a challenge. We know the critical importance of personal contact for both the teaching and research components of college activity. The Student Experience Survey, completed by 5,000 UCD students in June, highlighted the importance of face-to-face contact for students, particularly in relation to mental wellbeing and health, and so, within the constraints of the national public health guidelines, we strive to provide a real campus experience for our students, academically and socially, as we continue to grapple with the impact of the pandemic.

In September, we begin our Belfield 50 celebrations as we mark 50 years since the administration and faculties of law, arts, social sciences and business moved from Earlsfort Terrace to Belfield (page 76). Although some of the Belfield 50 programme we had planned cannot currently take place physically, I would like to invite you, our alumni, to join in and engage with the tours, exhibitions and conversations taking place at www.ucd.ie/belfield50. Belfield campus has come of age, and with the plans for the Centre for Creativity and the Centre for Future Learning progressing, I believe that we are putting in place world-class infrastructure that will support the next 50 years (and more) of this great University.