Welcome to INSPIRE
The “Integrated NanoScience Platform for Ireland” (INSPIRE) was established under PRTLI4 to create a national infrastructure enabling the delivery of innovative research in nanoscience. Within PRTLI5, the INSPIRE consortium went on to establish a structured PhD programme building upon the established research infrastructure, providing high-quality graduate training in fulfilment of the INSPIRE vision to develop a national graduate education programme. Increasingly, information and communication technologies and bionanosciences rely on multi-disciplinary training across a range of platform technologies. In response, a structured graduate education programme has been implemented introducing fundamental nanoscience, complemented by modules in electronics, photonics, and nanobioscience. A significant component of the structured programme encourages the development of business, innovation and entrepreneurship skills for engineering and science students, while maintaining a focus on scientific and technical excellence to address goals expressed in “Building Ireland’s Smart Economy”.
Foundation modules and topical courses have been developed by experts in nanoelectronics, nanophotonics and biotechnology and shared between partner institutes. Video conference and online delivery of modules, national workshops and joint PhD projects have been provided to establish a single community of educators, researchers and students, with academic exchanges and industry placements fostered by INSPIRE. We also seek to develop the framework to enable formal accreditation and exchange of credits.
The INSPIRE consortium is committed to collaborating on module development and delivery, to work with discipline specific graduate education programmes in engineering such as ICGEE on electronics manufacturing and in the physical (DGPP) and chemical (GRADCHEM) sciences, and to pool expertise and resources to provide the highest level of technical and entrepreneurial training to INSPIRE students.
INSPIRE objectives
- A single broad based but coherent graduate education programme in nanosciences
- Single point of entry into nanosciences graduate research in Ireland
- Dovetailing with Irish Universities Quality Board (IUQB) guidelines on fourth level graduate education and training in Ireland
- Provision of top tier nanoscience infrastructure from PRTLI Phase 4 to underpin graduate research training and projects in Phase 5 and beyond
- Internationally recognised Irish graduate research programme in nanosciences
- Stronger leverage into apposite international schemes such as EU FP7 Initial Training Networks and for future framework programmes
- Capacity to expand further to encompass new sub-domains of nanosciences
- Strengthening capacity to win significant further funding (national and international) to sustain research training and associated activities
The INSPIRE national graduate research education programme is funded under the framework of the Irish Government’s Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions Cycle 5, National Development Plan 2007-2013 with the assistance of the European Regional Development Fund.
