A University of Limerick researcher has been recognised for her commitment to Open Science and ensuring her research is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.
Associate Professor Ann-Marie Creaven from UL’s Department of Psychology has been announced as a winner of a YERUN Open Science Award 2024, at a ceremony in Brussels.
The Young European Research Universities Network [YERUN] Open Science Awards aim to recognise and celebrate outstanding contributions to Open Science within the YERUN community.
These awards highlight individuals or teams that have demonstrated a commitment to advancing Open Science principles, practices, and collaborations, which include transparency, sharing and inclusivity.
Associate Professor Creaven’s research is focused on understanding how dimensions of social connectedness are related to mental and physical health outcomes. She won the award for her diverse dissemination and public engagement activities ensuring long-term impact of the research.
Through engaging the public in her research projects, Associate Professor Creaven is enhancing the quality of the research generated and providing a means for members of the public to learn more about the research process.
Reacting to her win Associate Professor Creaven said: “I’m delighted to be featured among the YERUN winners. The network is a wonderful scaffold to develop collaborations with other researchers internationally and I'm especially happy to see psychological science recognised.
“I feel open science practices are essential in fulfilling the public service role of a university. Open science practices also help safeguard the quality of research, allowing researchers to build from strong foundations.”
Her current projects are focused on the impact of loneliness on health in young or " emerging" adults and the role of social support in managing illness including T1 diabetes and gestational diabetes which have been funded by awards from Research Ireland and the Irish Endocrine Society.
The evaluation panel commented positively on Associate Professor Creaven’s efforts on ‘citizen science’, which sees the public having a greater role within research and recognising the invaluable role they play in providing insights a researcher may not typically have.
“As researchers we often involve the public in elements of specific research projects. I plan to use this award to enable greater involvement from the public at an earlier stage by shaping priorities for future psychology and sociology research.
“Much of my research in loneliness helps us better understand how loneliness can be experienced as an occasional, mild, feeling for some people, and a persistent and intense experience for others, as well as understanding how different societal structures influence individual loneliness. This is one of a number of topics of interest to the public and the YERUN award will help us get a better picture of the public's research priorities to shape future research,” Associate Professor Creaven added.
This award marks the fourth year in a row that UL researchers have received a YERUN prize, demonstrating University of Limerick’s ongoing commitment to the development of Open Science.
Professor Aedín Culhane and Dr Maria Doyle, School of Medicine for their work on the Bioconductor project in 2023. Bioconductor is an open-source software project in the R statistical language, widely used in biomedical research. It provides tools for analysing genomic data, critical for understanding diseases at a molecular level.
Lero, Research Ireland Centre for Software hosted by UL was chosen as one of the recipients in 2022. The Lero Open Science Committee was awarded for developing centre-wide strategies that lead to increased visibility for researchers, greater opportunities for collaboration and greater transparency in the research process.
They established Lero’s Open Science Programme Office and Open Science Charter to set out a roadmap for how the research centre deals with Open Source in its day-to-day activities.
At the 2021 awards Dr Elaine Toomey won for the Open Science Special Interest Group of the European Health Psychology Society. The pan-European project aims to foster and promote open science practices within behavioural science and health psychology.
The group was established to develop the important yet untapped tole for behavioural science to improve open science behaviours across all disciplines.
More information on YERUN Open Science winners 2024.
