University College Dublin – UCD
University College Dublin – UCD (www.ucd.ie) is one of Europe’s largest research-intensive universities (>€450 M in last 5 years) offering undergraduate (>30K students), graduate (ca. 5K students), post-doctoral education and innovation and community engagement, with partnerships all over the world. Two of its strategic research priorities are “Energy and Environment” and “Agrio-Food” which are at the heart of the VALUMICS project. UCD has modern, state-of-the-art facilities necessary for the project and dedicated research support units for administration, finance, legal, innovation, HR, ethics, IT and data analysis.
The research PIs contributing to VALUMICS are from three schools in the university: UCD School of Biosystems and Food Engineering and UCD School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering are part of the College of Engineering and Architecture; they are also members the UCD Earth Institute, UCD Institute of Food and Health and the national Dairy Process Technology Centre (DPTC). UCD’s Centre for Business Analytics is located in Management Information Systems at UCD School of Business. Members of the Centre for Business Analytics collaborate with researchers elsewhere in UCD, notably with the School of Mathematical Sciences and the Natural Computing Research and Applications Group (NCRA).
The UCD Institute of Food and Health has 35 PIs, 50 researchers and 130 graduate students supported by >€50M since 2010 with strong industry links including Nestlé, Coca-cola, Abbot, Glanbia, Kerry Group, Carbery, Dairygold, Dawn Meats, Keypak, Largo, Mead Johnson, Pzifer, Diagio, Irish dairy processor (through the DPTC) and the Irish Grain and Feed Association. It is ranked 1st in the world for citations per paper published and 6th in Europe for volume of publications.
UCD is leading WP7 on New Advances in Quantitative Theory and Modelling, is a lead contributor to the WP4 Life Cycle Assessment activity and will play a significant role in project management (WP1), model specification (WP2) and dissemination (WP9). UCD will contribute to work in all other workpackages as necessary for successful completion of the project.