Ivan Sullivan with his students of pharmaceutical science at IT Sligo.
Combining interests
I
van Sullivan, who teaches pharmaceutical science at Sligo Institute of Technology is a happy man because he knows that his students will have no problem getting a job. Last November he remarked that “we had graduations yesterday and all the students I was talking to were already working.” Looking around the lab, he can pick out students from Meath, Donegal, Roscommon and even a local, like himself, from Sligo. Ivan likes to be close to the students, and early on in his career he realised that teaching is as important to him as science. After studying chemistry at Sligo IT, Ivan went on to take a degree in NUI Galway, and then he worked in industry. It all went well, but as he remarked, “I just wanted to get away for a while.” When an opportunity came up to give classes in English to students in Hungary
Ivan headed off, with the intention of staying away for a couple of months. “The very first day I went into the class,” he said, “I knew this was for me — after that I could never not teach.” The couple of months turned into two years, and then Ivan thought that if he liked teaching so much, surely he should be teaching the subject he was best at and had the qualifications to match. That brought him back to Sligo, and as he recalled, that round-about journey might never have begun if he had not had great teachers at Summer Hill College. He realises just how important those early influences are, and not surprisingly Ivan was ‘volunteered’ into taking responsibility for this year’s Science Week in Sligo. Science Week has become a great tradition at Sligo IT, and Ivan was keen to build on the foundation laid down by Margaret Mulroney and other members of the staff. “This year,” said Ivan proudly, “we brought in the EPA, Bord na Móna, Tróchaire,
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Bóther, the HSE, and there were lots of interactive events”, so it was all bigger than ever, but even so Ivan would like to see a big increase in older students who are about to leave school. Ivan is really pleased that his position within the college is fairly secure. When you have security, he said, you have more freedom to think ahead. Ivan has already combined his interest in chemistry with teaching, and he also has a masters in mammalian physiology. “I would like to tie all those qualifications together,” he said, and one of the areas that draws his interest is mitochondrial RNA. He is also interested in getting involved with cancer research, and as he remarked, people do not always realise it, but this sort of work involves a lot of chemistry. While seeing possibilities, Ivan is not too sure about where the divide should be when it comes to research. Traditionally, he said, the institutions have a more applied technical approach, while the universities focus on theory,