February 2015 Ryan Institute iTunes Podcast Channel Rapidly Climbs the Charts

The Ryan Institute for Environmental, Marine and Energy Research at NUI Galway has just launched a new podcast channel on iTunes. Within weeks of going live, iTunes are recommending the radio channel under ‘New & Noteworthy’ on its iTunes store. Interviews with academic staff about their research, recorded seminars by visiting academics and archived media interviews have been uploaded onto the channel and are accessible through the iTunes store for free.

The content can be downloaded by visiting the home page of the Ryan Institute website at www.ryaninstitute.ie. Listeners can hear about the human body generating electricity, computer models predicting storm surges, genetic analysis of sea creatures, challenging human consumption or antibiotics in the environment.

“In just three weeks since going live, the podcast channel has reached number four in the Natural Sciences category of iTunes podcasts. This is a major achievement considering the competition from the big news corporations around the world, and major global learning institutions who are regularly uploading content,” said Dr Martina Prendergast who is the Strategic Development Manager of the Ryan Institute and who conducted many of the interviews for the site.

She went on to explain that iTunes has created a number of categories for their podcasts and the Ryan Institute is filed under Science and Medicine, which has three sub-categories (Medicine, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences).

“Considering that there are about 30,000 overall daily podcasts on iTunes, the rapid rise through the charts of the Ryan Institute channel is a considerable success, and we are happy that our activities are profiled on a global platform. It was made possible by working with Garry Kelly from GK Media who made it really easy for us to record and upload content.” she added.

Dr Sarah Knight, Ryan Institute Outreach Officer, who conducted some of the interviews said: “We will be regularly adding content as the weeks go by, so I urge everyone to subscribe to the channel to receive updates and notifications of when we add new seminars and interviews. The goal over the next six to eight months is to record interviews with every one of our 100 academic staff and to get to number one in the iTunes charts.”

Dr Prendergast said: “This would mean that the research activities of the Ryan Institute community could reach audiences in countries across every continent. This will place the spotlight on our world-class research that is contributing to solving some of the most pressing issues of the 21st century around the environment, energy and food security, economic resilience, and social cohesion.”

ENDS