More than 2,000 graduates were conferred with awards ranging from Higher Certificate to PhD over two days of ceremonies at Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT ).
The ceremonies were held in the AIT International Arena, the first time it was used as a venue for graduation. Amongst the graduates were two new doctors, Dr Noel Gately and Dr Elaine Kenny, who were conferred with PhDs. Dr Gately’s SFI-funded research was on the development of a polymeric colon-targeted therapeutic device to aid in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome.
Dr Kenny’s research was on the processing, characterisation, and optimisation of polymers for bone tissue engineering. In total, 200 postgraduate qualifications were awarded, in areas ranging from intellectual disability nursing, child and youth care, business, accounting, energy and communications infrastructure, software engineering and polymer engineering. Twenty of the awards were research-based degrees.
In his presidential address, Prof Ciarán Ó Cathain said that “the desire for success by AIT graduates has been very much in evidence in recent days”. Quoting culinary graduate Pauline Curley, who was the leading Irish woman in the Dublin Marathon, and business graduate Michael Brewster, who is in the Irish-America Wall Street Top 50, Profesor Ó Cathain told the graduates: “Pauline and Michael are proud members of AIT’s alumni network, a community to which you as graduates are now very much welcome”.
