Award for Kilkenny resident for work which includes an assessment of the HSE Covid app

A Kilkenny resident has been awarded a prestigious academic prize for his work on the HSE Covid app.

Dr Jim Buckley is originally from Donegal but now lives on the Freshford Road.

He is a lecturer at the University of Limerick and a researcher with Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, and yesterday was awarded a Lero Director’s Prize for Research Excellence.

Dr Buckley is one of just eight researchers to receive the honour, and says he wasn’t expecting to win at the virtual ceremony telling KCLR News “To be honest I was just a bit in shock, so I didn’t really anticipate it coming or anything like that so that was my overwhelming response, I suppose we’ve got very used in the last few months to dealing with online conferences, communications, interviews even and I suppose as you go on some days are still a little clunky, but it gets better as time goes on, like it gets more normalised I suppose, it was a little strange but not excessively so”.

He also explains why his work was recognised “One of the awards is research excellence and that’s the award I won and I suppose it concerns the research I’ve done during the year, a lot of that would be for example looking at company sourced code and trying to improve its quality, helping them maintain their source code, the software systems they have that they depend on and more recently I got a grant working on Covid, assessing the Covid app, the national HSE Covid app, and seeing how future evolutions of that app could get better”.