Nicolle takes the pain out of needles

THE push to develop needles for painless delivery of drugs or vaccines is being spearheaded - microscopically - by research at University College Cork.

Nicolle Wilke, a PhD student on the team at the Department of Microelectronics, was chosen as winner of UCC’s Science for All postgraduate student public presentation competition on Wednesday. Rather than their actual research, competitors were judged on how they communicated the science of their work in a manner easily understandable to people with little or no scientific background.

The team at the Tyndall Institute in UCC have explored various methods to find optimum shapes and lengths of needle tips, involving liquid and gas immersion of silicon discs.