Three outstanding researchers at NUI Galway have been ranked among the ‘World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds: 2014’.
Professor Henry Curran, Professor Colin O’Dowd and Professor Donal O’Regan have been ranked among the world’s top 3,000 scientific minds by the multinational media body Thompson Reuters.
Those named on the list have earned their distinction by publishing the highest number of articles that rank among those most frequently cited by fellow researchers. More individuals were listed from NUI Galway than from any other Irish university.
According to NUIG’s president, Dr Jim Browne, the report describes those listed as being “on the cutting edge of their fields” and “among the most influential scientific minds of our time”. He also said that this was certainly true of the NUI Galway individuals who excel and out-perform in their fields of chemistry, climate change, and mathematics.
Professor Henry Curran is the director of the Combustion Chemistry Centre at NUIG. His research interest lies in the study of the chemistry of how fuels burn in combustors in order to increase efficiency and reduce emissions for a cleaner world. Professor Colin O’Dowd is the director of the Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies, at the Ryan Institute, NUIG. Through his pioneering work in the field of atmospheric physics, Professor O’Dowd is internationally renowned as one of the leading scientists in the field of climate change. Professor Donal O’Regan is a personal professor of mathematics at and an internationally recognised expert in the field of nonlinear analysis, differential equations, and fixed point theory. He is also one of the most prolific authors in the history of mathematics, having written more than 1,000 peer-reviewed articles.
Thomson Reuters analysts assessed papers indexed between 2002 and 2012 in 21 broad fields of study. They tracked authors who published numerous articles that ranked among the top one per cent of the most cited in their respective fields in the given year of publication, representing research that the scientific community has judged to be the most significant and useful.
