November NUI Galway Celebrates Five Researchers on Highly Cited Researchers 2020 List

NUI Galway is proud to announce that five academics have been named on the annual Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list from Clarivate.

Professor Henry Curran, Professor Donal O’Regan, Professor Patrick W. Serruys, Professor Ines Thiele and Professor William Wijns have joined the prestigious list of 6,167 researchers from more than 60 countries and regions who have been recognised this year. The list also includes 26 Nobel laureates, including three announced this year. 

The annual list identifies researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Their names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index.

• Professor Henry Curran, listed in the Engineering category, is Director of the Combustion Chemistry Centre at NUI Galway’s School of Chemistry and of the Energy Research Centre in the Ryan Institute. His research interest looks at the study of the chemistry of how fuels burn in combustors in order to increase efficiency and reduce emissions for a cleaner world. This is his seventh consecutive year being named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher.
• Professor Donal O'Regan, listed in the Mathematics category, is a Personal Professor of Mathematics at NUI Galway’s School of Mathematics, Statistics and Applied Mathematics and an internationally recognised expert in the field of Nonlinear Analysis, Differential Equations, and Fixed Point Theory. He has written over 1,000 peer-reviewed mathematical articles, making him one of the most prolific authors in the history of mathematics in the world. This is his seventh successive year being named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher.
• Professor Patrick W. Serruys, listed in the Clinical Medicine category, is Established Professor of Interventional Medicine and Innovation, Director of the CORRIB Research Centre for Advanced Imaging and Core Laboratory at NUI Galway, and is a world-renowned expert in interventional cardiology and imaging with more than four decades experience in clinical trials and innovation in medicine. He has pioneered several interventional procedures and devices as well as imaging techniques.
• Professor Ines Thiele, listed in the Cross-Field category, is a Professor in Systems Biomedicine in the School of Medicine and Discipline of Microbiology at NUI Galway. Her research aims at understanding how diet influences human health. To disentangle this complex relationship, her group develop and use comprehensive, computational models of human and gut microbial metabolism. To develop and improve these models, they focus on gastrointestinal and neurodegenerative diseases. Personalised nutrition and personalised drug treatments require comprehensive computer models that will change how diseases are treated and are an integral part of precision medicine.
• Professor William Wijns, listed in the Clinical Medicine category, is the Science Foundation Ireland Professor in Interventional Cardiology at NUI Galway and a world-renowned expert in cardiology. His research targets the development and validation of innovative techniques in interventional medicine including invasive physiological measurements and imaging, drug-eluting stents and applications of multi-detector coronary CT angiography. His most recent work explores the utility of sensors and biomarkers in order to prevent acute cardiovascular events in high-risk subjects.

President of NUI Galway, Professor Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh, said: “I would like to congratulate our five Highly Cited Researchers on joining this prestigious global list that includes Nobel laureates. Excellence for the public good in our research and teaching is a strategic focus for NUI Galway. To achieve this, we support ambition and enable the excellence of our people, who are leaders, innovators and critical thinkers contributing actively and openly through the research to cultural, societal and economic change and responding to emerging fields of research. Our academics on this year’s Clarivate list are pioneering leaders and innovators in their respected fields and I wish them sustained success in their endeavours to address global societal needs.”

Professor Lokesh Joshi, Vice President for Research at NUI Galway, said: “I wish to extend my warmest congratulations to Henry, Donal, Patrick, Ines and William on being included in the Clarivate top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers in the world. This outstanding achievement is testament to their ongoing contribution to innovative research amongst their global peers and their shared passion for improving the world. Being included on the 2020 list is a strong endorsement of NUI Galway’s research contribution globally.”

The methodology that determines the “who’s who” of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. It also uses the tallies to identify the countries and research institutions where these scientific elite are based.

David Pendlebury, Senior Citation Analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate said: “In the race for knowledge, it is human capital that is fundamental and this list identifies and celebrates exceptional individual researchers at NUI Galway who are having a great impact on the research community as measured by the rate at which their work is being cited by others.”

The full 2020 Highly Cited Researchers list and executive summary can be found online here or follow #HighlyCited2020.

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