IN ASSOCIATION WITH KTI

Fuel the future with EU funding

The awards that can help to nurture ideas across borders. By Mel Clarke
Tony McEnroe of SiriusXT
Tony McEnroe of SiriusXT

‘I am nearly all the way up the ladder,” says Tony McEnroe as he answers my phone call. Mercifully, the chief executive and co-founder of SiriusXT isn’t using a ladder as a cringey metaphor for the heady heights his company has reached. Instead, he’s “just doing some house painting,” he says, before we get down to talking business.

SiriusXT has developed the world’s only commercial, laboratory-scale soft x-ray microscope in collaboration with University College Dublin researchers, and European partners in Germany, Spain and Finland. In September it secured €5.67 million in funding from Horizon 2020, the European Union’s research and innovation programme at the time, for a disruptive photonics project that provides insights into the origins of viral disease.

Unsurprisingly, the award has reconfigured SiriusXT’s