A Cork company, run by Drinagh man Sean McCarthy, is designing training courses for the world’s top universities.
A CORK company, run by Drinagh man Sean McCarthy, is designing training courses for the world’s top universities.
Hyperion is a company based in Watergrasshill in Cork and run by McCarthy, a former student of St Fachtna’s De La Salle in Skibbereen.
‘We provide training courses to 58 or the top 100 universities,’ he explained. ‘We also provide training to 92 of the top 200 universities, according to the September 2016 top university rankings. When we looked further down the list, we only found four universities in the lower ranking. In most European countries we provide training courses to their top universities.’
Hyperion provides training and workshops at all levels of a university, with boardroom workshops for directors, training progammes for support staff and training courses for researchers. ‘We train directors how to follow the political debates and to identify trends in European research policy,’ he pointed out. ‘We train the researchers how the evaluation process operates and how to explain the potential impact of their research. We then train the administrators how to support the researchers in European research programmes.
Dr McCarthy was a researcher in University College Cork from 1980 until 1988. He was responsible for managing a research group in the area of photovoltaics (solar systems). A major part of this job was raising funding and managing European projects.
He was also hired by the European Commission to evaluate their research proposals.In 1995 Dr McCarthy was invited to give a short course to the European Union’s own research centres. There was such a reaction to the courses that he decided to develop and market the courses. Since 1995, over 65,000 researchers have attended his courses in 29 countries.
