Anne Graham
Chief Executive Officer, National Transport Authority
Anne is Chief Executive Officer with the National Transport Authority. The Authority is responsible for the provision, regulation and integration of public transport services, the provision of supporting infrastructure for sustainable transport and for driving the greater use of sustainable transport as a mode of choice.
She previously worked with the Authority as Director of Public Transport Services on the regulation and provision of public transport services nationally. Prior to joining the NTA, she worked in the Dublin local authorities as a chartered civil engineer in the drainage, roads and traffic divisions; as a project manager on the redevelopment of Dublin’s O’Connell Street area and as an Area Manager in the South West area of the city.
Ann-Marie Holmes
Vice President TMG, Fab24 Factory Manager
Ann-Marie graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in Engineering and Maths.
She is currently Vice President of the Technology & Manufacturing Group, Intel Corporation.
She has worked at all four Intel Fabrication/Sort manufacturing factories. In Fab 10 she was a Process Engineer. In Fab 14 she became Diffusion Group Leader.
Anne-Marie became the Fab 24 Factory Manager in 2012 with responsibility for delivering 65/90 nanometer Best in Class results and preparing the organisation for a new technology.
Anne-Marie has spent all of her 27 year career working with the Intel Corporation.
Prof. David Jones
Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education and Students and Professor of Biomaterial Science at Queen’s University Belfast
David gained a BSc in Pharmacy, a PhD in Pharmaceutics and a DSc, all from Queen’s University Belfast.
From 1989 – 1992 he was a lecturer in Pharmaceutical Engineering at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand) and from 1992 – 1994 he held the position of Head of Formulations at Norbrook Industries Limited.
In 1994, he was appointed to a lectureship at the School of Pharmacy, QUB. Since 1999 he holds a personal Chair (in Biomaterial Sciences) at the School of Pharmacy, Queen’s University Belfast.
His research concerns the design, development and engineering of pharmaceutical materials/dosage forms and biomedical devices.
He is the author of three textbooks, 10 patents and over 400 research papers and has been awarded the Lilly prize for pharmaceutical research, the British Pharmaceutical Conference Science Award and more recently, the academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences Innovative Science Award.
Extensive commercialisation of of Prof. Jones’ research has occurred within both the pharmaceutical and medical devices domains. In addition, he has been a founding member and Director of two spin-out companies from Queen’s University Belfast, Xiomateria, a company with patented technologies for urinary catheters and Re-Vana Therapeutics, a company with patented technologies directed on the improved treatment of sight-threatening eye diseases.
He is the editor of the Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology and is a previous holder of a prestigious Royal Society Industrial Fellowship.
John Martin
Planning Consultant
John qualified as a planner in 1975 and served in various Dublin local authorities and in An Bord Pleanála before being appointed in 2002 as Principal Planning Adviser in the former Department of the Environment and Local Government.
Following his retirement in 2011, he was appointed to the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board, which is responsible for designing, building and equipping the new Children’s Hospital at St. James’s Hospital, Dublin. He has provided planning advice to a number of public bodies, and has worked with the Academy in making submissions in relation to the National Planning Framework and the Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies.
Regina Moran
Enterprise Director, Vodafone
Regina is currently Enterprise Director with Vodafone, She has filled many senior management roles with Fujitsu including:
- Vice President of Industries in Fujitsu EMEAI, responsible for business growth across Europe, leading a multi-national team.
- CEO, Fujitsu UK and Ireland where she delivered revenues greater than £2bn for the first time in ten years, while growing profitability.
- CEO, Fujitsu (Ireland) Ltd. following the merger of the three existing Fujitsu businesses in Ireland.
- CEO of Fujitsu Services.
- Co-founder of DMR Consulting Ireland in 1997. Held the role of Director of Operations responsible for Project Delivery. DMR Consulting became Fujitsu Consulting and was subsequently merged with Fujitsu Services in April 2004.
- Electronics Engineer with Amdahl, a computer mainframe manufacturer, where she was co-founder of the services and consulting group.
She is a Chartered Engineer with 25 years’ experience in the IT sector.
She was a non-executive director of EirGrid from 2011 to 2015
Regina is a Past President of Engineers Ireland.
John T. Murphy
Deputy Managing Director, Mott McDonald Ireland
John Murphy graduated from University College Cork with a degree in Engineering.
He has almost 40 years’ experience in the delivery of major infrastructure projects in Ireland and overseas. He is currently deputy Managing Director of Mott McDonald Ireland and in addition is Deputy Manager of the Design Division of Mott McDonald which has offices in Ireland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Norway.
John has led the delivery of many major infrastructure projects in Ireland including:
- The €100m Jack Lynch Tunnel in Cork which comprised 1.8km of dual carriageway through a reinforced concrete immersed tube under the River Lee.
- The €300m Waterford Bypass which included 18km of dual carriageway along with a 225m main span cable-stayed bridge crossing of the River Suir.
- Currently, John is undertaking a similar role on the €230m 14km N25/N30 Bypass.
In more recent times, john has provided business leadership across the Europe Design Division of Mott McDonald which included the Ireland led detailed design of the award-winning Light Rail project in Bergen, Norway.
He won the “Mullins Silver Medal” presented by the Institution of Engineers in 1996 for a paper on the Jack Lynch Tunnel, presented jointly with JD. Shinkwin.
Prof. Patrick O’Shea
President of University College Cork
In February 2017 Professor Patrick O’Shea became the 15th President of the University College Cork.
He returned to Ireland following a three-decade career in the United States where his most recent appointment was as Vice President and Chief Research Officer of the University of Maryland, and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
He previously served as Director of the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics, and Chair of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Maryland.
Prior to that he was a scientist and Project Leader at the University of California Los Alamos National Laboratory, and on the faculty of Duke University.
Prof. O’Shea’s technical expertise lies in creating light where there is darkness in the electromagnetic spectrum with free-electron lasers and in the related fields of applied electromagnetics, nonlinear dynamics and charged particle accelerator technology.
He played a leading role in the founding of the Maryland NanoCentre; the Maryland Centre for Applied Electromagnetics; the Maryland Cyber Security Centre.
For his accomplishments in science, engineering and education he has been elected to Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and as Distinguished Scholar-Teacher of the University of Maryland.
He was educated at University College Cork and the University of Maryland.
Niall Olden
Managing Partner, Kernel Capital
Niall Olden trained as a Chartered Management Accountant, and holds a B.Comm from University College Cork, and M.Sc. in International Business from Trinity College Dublin.
Following graduation, Niall spent almost 10 years in the print and packaging industry with the Jefferson Smurfit Group and the Clondalkin Group, working across multiple manufacturing roles.
In 1999, in Cork, he founded, and is Managing Partner of, Kernel Capital, a private Venture Capital company. Through the firm he has raised over €200M in investment funds and has sourced and delivered funding to over 80 Irish, intellectual property rich, hardware and software, engineering companies North and South.
He has been a Board member and mentor to most of these companies. Today, through Kernel’s engineering focussed investments guided by Niall, Kernel Capital’s portfolio of over 80 companies employ over 1,100 people on the island of Ireland, predominantly in engineering focussed companies, and primarily at graduate and post graduate level.
His active participation as an engineering-aware investor, board member and mentor, has led to the successful commercial exploitation of many ideas, concepts and patents through transactions by these Irish companies across the US, Europe & Asia.
Driven by Niall’s vision, with investment from a pillar bank (BoI), state agencies in both RoI and NI, two Irish University Foundations and one of the world’s largest fund of fund investors (New York State Pension Fund), Kernel Capital, investing across the whole engineering sector, is an excellent role model for the best in engineering based VC investment. Niall is currently a member of the Audit Committee of University College Cork and the Advisory Board of the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology, and was a member of InterTradeIreland’s Equity Steering Committee and a mentor on the Kauffman Fellows Program, Palo Alto, C.A.
Kieran F. Drain,
Ph.D. FRSC.
Kieran is currently COO and GM Professional Lighting at Soraa Inc. Silicon Valley company Soraa, founded by 2014 Physics Nobel prize winner Dr. Shuji Nakamura, manufactures LEDs using a unique GaN-on-GaN (Gallium Nitride on Gallium Nitride) process that creates a perfect crystal structure with 1000x fewer defects and 5x more light per unit area. This advanced point source LED lighting technology allows for superior color rendering in architectural directional lighting. Soraa is an innovator in the new field of circadian lighting for health and wellness.
Kieran has most recently served as CEO of the Tyndall National Institute in Ireland (2013-2017), one of Europe’s premier Micronanoelectronic and Photonics National research institutes.
Prior to that he was Vice President & General Manager of the Lighting and Display division at Rambus, Inc. (Nasdaq RMBS) a major licensor of semiconductor memory, optics and cyber security IP, and before that, President & CEO of Silicon Valley Nanomaterials Technology company, NanoGram Corporation (now Teijin Japan). Prior to joining NanoGram Corporation, he was Vice President and General Manager for the Performance Polymers Division of Avery Dennison Corporation (NYSE: AVY) with prior leadership roles at Ciba Specialty Chemicals (now BASF) and Loctite Corporation (now Henkel). Kieran has also served as Independent Director of a number of successful technology start-up companies including Catacel Corp. (now Johnson Matthey) and Sirrus Inc. (now Nippon Shokubai).
Kieran holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Chemistry, an MSc in Polymer Chemistry and a BSc in Pharmacy degrees from The Queens University of Belfast in Northern Ireland, an MBA (Finance and Accounting) from Regis University in Denver, Colorado and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, United Kingdom. He is a member of the Executive Advisory Board or the Institute of Materials Research at The Ohio State University, and Chair of the supervisory committee for the Bernal Institute, University of Limerick.
Dr. Mary Kelly
Dr. Mary Kelly who joined the Academy in 2017 receives her Parchment.
Mary Kelly holds a PhD in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin and an MBA from Dublin University.
She was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2008, and has served on it’s Council and as Vice-President.
She started her working career in the pharmachem industry and then moved to IBEC where she lead policy development in the environmental area, breaking new ground in the waste management and environment areas.
She joined the Environmental Protection Agency as Director General in 2002 where she successful in establishing the EPA as a trusted source of scientific information on the environment both within Government and the general public.
She achieved particular success in communication important messages about the threat od climate change to a wide audience.
Mary currently hods the position of Chair of An Bord Pleanála, a role she took up in 2011.