The Minister of State for Science and Technology, Mr Noel Treacy, has presented the annual Merville Lay Seminars award to two postgraduate students from UCD's department of pharmacology.
The competition is for scientists with a brief that they present their work to a lay audience.
The joint winners were Ms Tracy Keane, who is working on factors reducing the likelihood of organ transplant rejection, and Ms Ann Hopkins, whose research focuses on "controlling the traffic lights of intestinal infection".
Ms Suzie Coughlan of the UCD department of biochemistry, who is working on the attributes that give some proteins stability at high temperatures, was runner-up in a competition sponsored by the Forfas Science, Technology and Innovation Awareness Programme and by Guinness Ireland.
Mr Treacy paid tribute to UCD for staging a unique event within the Irish context.
It was helping to popularise science, but most significantly to underline the fundamental role of science in sustaining the economy and society in general.
The drug cyclosporin has been highly successful in reducing transplant organ rejection but can cause kidney damage as a side-effect.
Ms Keane's research centres on the role that the presence of "transforming growth factor" may have in causing the damage.
Ms Hopkins said her research raised the possibility of fooling bacteria - such as those causing salmonella poisoning - into combining with a "decoy drug" rather than cause infection by crossing the human intestinal wall and entering the blood stream.
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