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Professor Da-Wen Sun, UCD School of Biosystems and Food Engineering, has been elected Full Member - Academician of International Academy of Refrigeration at its recent General Assembly held on 26 April 2018 in St. Petersburg, Russia. This is the sixth academician title that Professor Sun has been awarded since his first election to Royal Irish Academy in 2010, and subsequently to Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe), Polish Academy of Sciences, International Academy of Food Science and Technology, and International Academy of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering.

Dr Mick Donegan of SMARTlab and the Inclusive Design Research Centre (Dublin and Toronto) and Director of charity SpecialEffect (Oxford) which creates multimodal interfaces and creative educational design solutions for kids with complex needs, has just released a new eye-controlled interface to Minecraft which has the gaming and education communities buzzing worldwide!

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) on 28 September announced a 2018 RIBA International Fellowship for Shane O’Toole. The RIBA has throughout its history honoured men and women who have made a major contribution to the world of design and in particular architecture. The lifetime honour, conferred annually, allows recipients to use the suffix Int FRIBA.

A new research centre at University College Dublin (UCD) will investigate how cities can become healthier and more prosperous places for their citizens. The interdisciplinary Spatial Dynamics Lab, established by Dr Dieter F. Kogler and Dr Francesco Pilla, will provide advancements in the analysis of innovation processes, environmental impact, evolutionary patterns and structural change at a city and regional scale.

Donn Holohan BArch 2011 Elspeth Lee  BArch 2008   Studying at Richview Neither of us had family backgrounds in architecture, but we were both drawn to it as a profession - Donn had an affinity for making and studied at Letterfrack, in the Furniture Design and Manufacturing school designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey before entering UCD School of Architecture. Elspeth had been redesigning her house on graph paper from the age of 8.

UCD has conferred an honorary degree on Sir Ciarán Devane, Chief Executive of the British Council. Ciarán, a native of Dublin, entered UCD in 1980 to study Engineering, choosing the discipline of Chemical Engineering after first year, before specialising in the newly emerging field of Biochemical Engineering after his second year. He graduated with a 1st Class Honours BE (Biochemical Engineering) in June of 1984.

PolliNation, an early-stage start-up, has secured first place, winning the Sustainability LaunchPad Award 2017.  David Gormley pitched the early-stage venture which looks to rent beehives to farmers, to increase farm yields and encourage the growth of the bee population. With the honey produced, they propose to produce an artisanal mead. Deputy Eamon Ryan, TD and leader of the Green Party presented the award to UCD Engineering students David Gormley, Fionn O’Connell-Hussey, Katie Mullan and Abdullah Alsaeed.

London is waging an ongoing battle in its aging 19th-century sewers against the scourge of "fatbergs" — congealed masses of cooking oil, wipes, condoms, diapers and other gunk — that pollute and clog the underground system. London sewer workers who coined the term for the stinking mass need to use shovels and high-pressure hoses to blast it apart. The utility Thames Water announced Friday that it finally broke up a monster fatberg whose existence was made public in September. The 800-foot- long, 130-ton blob the size of 11 double-decker buses was blocking a 270-yard stretch of sewer under Whitechapel Road in London’s East End.