Michael Organ, director of the York University Combinatorial Chemistry Facility, is off to Ireland today as a recipient of one of the 14 inaugural E.T.S. Walton Visitor Awards. The $182,000 (130,000 euros) one-year award was given through the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) program that provides some of the largest individual research grants among government-funding agencies worldwide.
In going to Ireland, Organ will be taking the technology he has developed in the Combinatorial Chemistry Facility and in the field of medical chemistry, and applying it to finding new methods of faster drug development. He said he was invited to go partly because he is "fairly well connected to industry in that field. And I’ll probably be helping to set up a company over there, establishing methods for the development of new drugs."
SFI was established by the Irish government as part of the National Development Plan for 2000-2006 to assist Ireland’s research institutions and institutes of technology in recruiting scientists and building cooperative research programs with industry in the fields which underpin biotechnology and information and communications technology. The E.T.S. Walton Visitor Award was set up to honour Ireland’s 1951 Nobel laureate physicist.