Standing Up For Research: Dr Darren Fayne

Wanting to ensure that the voice of research staff is heard, he has taken on many instrumental roles in research advocacy, including as chair of the TRSA (Trinity Research Staff Association) and member of the College Board. He is constantly supporting the interests of Trinity researchers and ensuring they are recognised in resulting policy.

It was in 2015 that, due to a lack of clarity around how systems functioned in College, Fayne decided to run for election to the College Board. At that time, he observes, “I don’t think there was a research member of staff on the Board making decisions. Nobody was representing researchers.” He was elected in 2016 for a 4-year term, which he described as an “eye-opener.” Fayne spent his term working to increase the Board’s awareness of research staff at policy level, which got a little bit better each year. Thankfully, he believes, “it’s actually quite good at this stage.”

Then in 2019, near the end of his term, he and Trinity colleagues decided to restart the TRSA to push for positive changes in the employment and working conditions of research staff. They organised events for researchers to meet, socialise and discuss news, tackle problems, and invited external experts to talk about relevant topics such as pensions and career development. When the present Provost election was happening during a COVID-19 lockdown, they organised virtual hustings for the three candidates to speak to researchers. TRSA meetings were “a nice way of even just socialising,” Fayne remarks, “to get to know fellow research staff and colleagues, because being a researcher can be very isolating, especially at that time.”

At that time he also established an Irish connection with Eurodoc, an organisation which lobbies at an EU level on behalf of researchers. It’s an international federation of researchers from 24 countries of the European Union and the Council of Europe. In April 2019, Fayne attended the Eurodoc Conference and AGM in Brussels, formally spoke on IFUT’s application to join on behalf of Irish researchers, and was successfully voted into membership.

COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 posed very specific challenges to researchers: quite simply, “researchers couldn’t research.” Yet, Fayne points out, “time was still ticking on their contracts. So they couldn’t develop more data to progress their career or publish papers or go to conferences.” As a result, he and colleagues from various Irish universities reformed the IrishRSA (Irish Research Staff Association) to lobby the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science for full cost extensions to researcher contracts, “to make up for the amount of time they couldn't be in the lab, or a field trip or research mission, or whatever they had to do to get their data by the end of the grant. Their salary would still be paid, and they could finish off the projects that they were employed on.” Other groups also lobbied for this, which was successful, and funding was released to the universities to extend contracts of PhDs candidates as well as research staff.

The IrishRSA’s success signals the power in combining researchers’ voices: they are still very active, Fayne confirms. “We met with the Department a few weeks ago. We’re talking about this new research funding organisation, this merger of the SFI and IRC.” Ultimately, he observes, most of the funding these bodies spend is on salaries. So the researchers, who are availing of most of the funding, should have some say in policy, employment conditions and how these organisations work.

Currently, he has a third year PhD candidate working with him, Shubhangi Kandwal, who is funded by an IRC Postgraduate Fellowship, and an IRC-funded postdoctoral researcher, Ivan Čmelo, started this September. “We’re thinking about future outbreaks caused by a coronavirus. Shubhangi’s project is to examine the current virus, and to look at the 29 proteins that make up the virus.” There are parts of the coronavirus that do not change between variants. That indicates that if these parts change, the virus dies. As a result, “it could be possible to design a small molecule that would switch it off at that site, and then, future variations of the virus hopefully won’t be able to mutate at that site. So that would also work on future variants.” Right now they’re at the beginning of the process, and the resulting molecules are something that chemists and biologists will be able to work on.

Due to the billions of possible combinations of small molecules and their corresponding disease-associated proteins, Fayne is also exploring avenues to speed up the process through CADD. “There’s a Canadian organisation called CACHE who organised a global competition. They wanted researchers from across the world to submit their computational strategy for designing a new small molecule to block a particular protein.” Currently, there’s hundreds of different software packages that have a role in CADD, but no real standardisation or validation. Fayne noticed that CACHE’s second challenge was on SARS-CoV-2: “And it was on non-structural protein 13 (nsp13), which was already of interest to Shubhangi. So we developed a big computational screening protocol and submitted it, and we were ranked third in the world.”

This process is only the first part of a longer one to design the required compounds that chemists will need to make, however. Starting off with 1.24 billion possibilities, these molecules are passed through Fayne and Kandwal’s computational pipeline and were pared down to 100 options. A Ukrainian company, Enamine, then synthesised the compounds. CACHE are biologically testing the compounds against nsp13, and this data will be sent back to Dublin for Fayne’s team to work on, to optimise their computational models with that biological data and then design another improved 100 compounds. The third CACHE competition, he observes, was also on a SARS-CoV-2 protein, non-structural protein 3: “So we applied to that as well, and happily were selected. We should be getting data on the first one, very soon, and the next one, just a couple of months later.”

Has his advocacy work influenced his own research efforts? In 2018 he helped to organise a joint CADD conference between Biruni University, Turkey, and Trinity College, where he was keen to get PhD candidates and postdocs on to the organising committee, to give them necessary organisational experience and a differential on their CV. In order to do so, he linked each non-Irish invited speaker with a researcher. “So if the speaker was flying in and wanted to be met at the airport, they met them. And then when we brought speakers out in the evening, the researchers came along as well. So all these postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers made new valuable connections. I think everybody enjoyed it. I probably wouldn't have gone to so much effort if I hadn't worked with the TRSA.”

Fayne points out that his research has always been collaborative: “I design a compound, and then I convince the chemists to make it, and then the biologists test it in a cell line or test it against the cancer or whatever I’ve designed to treat. So there’s at least 3 different disciplines, and sometimes more when involving programming computational requirements as well.” He observes that that it’s usually those in the humanities or the social sciences involved in research association activity, as there often can be “a kind of symbiosis” between their research and their advocacy work. Yet, he confirms, “I’m going to keep doing it for as long as I can.” Indeed, it is fair to say that Fayne’s career demonstrates that workers from all disciplines can stand up for research.

- Article written by Dr Sarah Cullen