SEVEN WORLD CLASS research centres are to be the recipients of a €300 million investment, the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton, has announced.

The funding is comprised of €200 million from the Irish Exchequer, via the Research Centres Programme of Science Foundation Ireland, with co-funding of a further €100 million coming from 156 industry partners, including Cisco, Hewlett Packard, GSK, and RTÉ.

The co-funded research investment is the largest that has ever been announced in Ireland and is to be provided over the next six years.

Today’s announcement is part of government’s “Action Plan for Jobs 2013″, and it is hoped that 800 researcher positions will be directly supported by the money.

Bruton said that the funding of the centres of research excellence would be “game-changers for Irish scientific research.”

The Minister for Research and Innovation, Seán Sherlock, added that today’s announcement was “unprecedented” and would help to deliver “the quality jobs of the future for Ireland”.

Research centres

The seven research centres to be created are to focus on the following areas:

1. Big Data, to include the development of data analytics technologies
2. Marine renewable energy, which includes wave, tidal and floating wind devices
3. Nanotechnology/engineered materials
4. Food for health/functional foods, with a focus on disease prevention, healthy ageing and improved population health
5. Photonics (the generation, manipulation and utilization of light)
6. Perinatal Translational Research, whose aim is to find solutions which relate to complications of pregnancy
7. Drug synthesis/crystallization, to help produce new and improved drug formulations

The seven research areas were chosen from 35 proposals.

Read: €60m investment released for pioneering research projects >