Dr Annie Curtis, StAR Research Lecturer in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics at RCSI has been awarded a prestigious L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science 2017 Fellowship at a ceremony held in the Royal Society in London yesterday evening.

The award is worth more than €17,000 and will support Dr Curtis's research focusing on the human body clock and its control of inflammation.

For the past 10 years, the L'Oréal-UNESCO UK & Ireland Fellowships For Women in Science initiative has been awarding fellowship positions to outstanding female researchers in the UK and Ireland.

Dr Annie Curtis, who leads the Immune-Clock Lab at RCSI, was one of five winners of these fellowships and the only Irish winner this year. The fellowship will support her research into understanding the precise mechanisms by which the body clock restrains inflammation from a key immune cell called the macrophage. Dr Curtis was recruited to RCSI in 2016 as part of the Strategic Academic Recruitment Programme (StAR).

Speaking on this award for Dr Curtis, Professor Tracy Robson, Head of Molecular & Cellular Therapeutics, RCSI said: "This is a fantastic achievement and I am proud to congratulate Dr Annie Curtis on this highly competitive award for which there were nearly 300 applicants. It is a great testament to her research within the recently established Immuno-Clock Lab. Annie will be an excellent ambassador for Women in Science and this award reflects the world-class research ongoing at RCSI. Indeed the only Irish winners of these For Women in Science fellowships now reside within this institution." 

Dr Tríona Ní Chonghaile, now a Research Lecturer in the Department of Physiology & Medical Physics and also recruited under the StAR programme at RCSI, was a winner of L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship 2015.

Along with Dr Curtis, the four other recipients of the Fellowships are:

• Dr Radha Boya, University of Manchester, Nanoscience
• Dr Manju Kurian, UCL Great Ormond Street, Neurology
• Dr Bethan Psaila, University of Oxford, Haematology
• Dr Priya Subramanian, University of Leeds, Mathematics

RCSI is ranked in the top 250 institutions worldwide in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2016-2017). It is an international not-for-profit health sciences institution, with its headquarters in Dublin, focused on education and research to drive improvements in human health worldwide.