Cork institutes win €4.8m scheme

Cork: The Tyndall National Institute and Cork Institute of Technology have been awarded the joint co-ordination of a high-tech EU postgraduate training programme.

The €4.8 million scheme, Postgraduate Research on Photonics as an Enabling Technology (PROPHET), was launched at Cork’s Blackrock Castle Observatory, with 15 European academic and industry partners.

About €1m will be spent in Ireland. Project co-ordinator Dr Guillaume Huyet said: “Photonics is the science of generating and manipulating light, and has applications in a diverse range of areas. The PROPHET research training programme focuses on photonics as an enabling technology, and will cover applications such as telecommunications, gas sensing for environmental monitoring, solar energy, and medical imaging.”