Teagasc – Supporting Young Researchers

The 2007 Teagasc Walsh Postgraduate Fellowships seminar is taking place at the RDS in Dublin today, Wednesday, 14 November 2007. This seminar provides an opportunity for the brightest and best young scientific researchers working in the agriculture, food and related areas to present their work to a wider audience.

Each year the outstanding young researcher is awarded the RDS medal and a Teagasc award and selected as Young Researcher of the Year at the conclusion of the seminar. This year’s winner of the RDS medal is Lisa Costello, a Walsh Fellow working at the Teagasc Animal Production Research Centre, Athenry and at the Physiology Department in the National University of Ireland, Galway. She received the award for her research work on early embryo loss in cattle, looking at the influence of the protein environment of the pre-implantation embryo during the oestrous cycle.

Teagasc is a major supporter of postgraduate students in Ireland, funding more than 150 students pursuing MSc or PhD programmes at any one time. The organisation commits an annual budget of €2.8 million a year to the Walsh Postgraduate Fellowships Scheme.

Opening the seminar, Dr Tom O Dwyer, chairman of the Teagasc Authority said; “The Walsh fellowship programme has helped to retain high quality graduates in Ireland, who might otherwise have been lost to research and possibly to the Irish economy. Many of these graduates continue to make a vital contribution to the Irish agri-food industry.”

In the keynote address to the seminar, Professor Patrick Cunningham, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government, said; “As we approach the 50th anniversary of the establishment of An Foras Taluntais (now Teagasc), this is a good time both to look back and look forward. When the Institute was founded in 1958, Irish agriculture had been stagnant for decades. The subsequent 25 years, until the introduction of quotas was a period of dramatic modernisation. From a fixed resource base of 5 million hectares, output was doubled.”

He continued; “At the same time, manpower in agriculture was more than halved. The net effect was that productivity per person increased five-fold in less than a generation. The teams of researchers in the Institute, led by the inspiration of Dr. Tom Walsh, were at the forefront of this revolution. “

Professor Cunningham said; “We are now at the point of departure for a new revolution. Policy in Europe has shifted in a way that favours our agriculture and food sector. Milk quotas are likely to go, and farmers will once again be rewarded by the market for increased output, increased efficiency and increased quality. We now have a sophisticated food industry that last year transformed our farm output into €8 billion in exports. This new departure has plenty of challenge for the renewed and reinvigorated research teams in Teagasc - New demands (energy efficiency, environment, climate management), New opportunities (nutritional quality, food safety, energy production) and New technologies (new levels of informatics, genetics, chemistry).”

The annual Walsh Postgraduate Fellowships seminar is organised by Teagasc, in association with the RDS, as part of its contribution to Science Week 2007. The Walsh Fellowships are named after the late Dr Tom Walsh, first director of both the Agricultural Research Institute and ACOT, and a prime mover in developing agriculture and food research in Ireland.