ICON, the global provider of outsourced development services based in Dublin, Ireland, has further consolidated its strategic relationship with University College Dublin (UCD) by teaming up on a new graduate certificate in clinical research.
The 12-week programme, which will be available to life-science graduates from September 2013, combines industry-specific education and training with a parallel clinical-based internship in the UCD Clinical Research Centre at Dublin’s St Vincent’s and Mater Misericordiae University Hospitals.
Education modules for the clinical-research certificate will include clinical-trial management; data and project management; clinical-research governance and ethics; and the clinical trial of the future.
Ciaran Murray, chief executive officer of ICON, said the company was collaborating with the UCD School of Medicine on the “uniquely tailored” programme to “ensure that we develop the talent to support our future growth”.
Growing links
According to Professor Patrick Murray, Dean of Medicine and head of the School of Medicine & Medical Science at University College Dublin, the initiative “further demonstrates the University’s growing links with industry”.
As Ireland’s leading academic clinical research facility, the UCD Clinical Research Centre “has supported increasing numbers of investigator-led and industry-sponsored studies over the past six years”, Murray added.
ICON established the ICON Newman Fellowship in Genomics, a two-year post-doctoral fellowship based at the UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science and at the College’s Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory, when it first forged its strategic partnership with UCD in September 2012.
In April this year, the company announced the launch of the ICON Business Academy, developed with the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. The Academy offers a number of tailored, university-accredited programmes to ICON staff, the first of which is the Certificate in International Business Management.
