Driving Discovery Through Research Excellence: UM awards Research Excellence Funds 2025 to Support Five Research Projects

On Thursday 15 January 2026, University of Malta Rector Prof. Alfred J. Vella met with five resident academics who were selected as recipients of funding from the UM Research Excellence Fund, for proposals that were submitted in the Call for Applications that closed in February 2025 .

The awarded funds will cover an array of topics in different disciplinary areas that include one project in each of the following five categories: Arts and Humanities; Engineering, ICT and Built Environment; Medical and Health Sciences; Natural Sciences and Knowledge Science; Social Sciences and Education.

The projects were chosen based on reviews and scores from independent, external peer reviewers.

A maximum of EUR 60,000 per project will be disbursed, with the projects expected to commence in 2026 and span over a period of two years. The Research Fund Committee, currently chaired by Pro-Rector for Research and Knowledge Transfer, Prof. Ing. Simon G. Fabri, is responsible for the administration of these funds.

The recipients of the 2025 funds are:

Rev. Dr Nicholas Joseph Doublet (Faculty of Theology), for the project ‘The Collegium Melitense Research Project. Integrating Church History, Cultural Studies and Heritage Science’ from the Arts and Humanities category
Dr Jean-Paul Mollicone (Faculty of Engineering), for the project ‘Microplastic Extraction from Water using Flow Dynamics’ from the Engineering, ICT and Built Environment category
Prof. Melissa Marie Formosa Friggieri (Faculty of Health Sciences), for the project ‘ZEDCOM: Zebrafish Evaluation of Diabetes COMorbidities and drug targets’ from the Medical and Health Sciences category
Prof. Joseph Caruana (Faculty of Science), for the project ‘Using Supercomputer Models and Data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to Unravel the Milky Way Bar’s Growth’ from the Natural Sciences and Knowledge Sciences category
Prof. Joseph Borg (Faculty of Health Sciences), for the project ‘Space4All: Launching Malta’s Young Minds to the Stars’ from the Social Sciences and Education category

"The researcher's path is a challenging one, but there are those eureka moments, where the results anticipated are achieved, or when one's paper is accepted in a peer-reviewed journal, which make it all worth pursuing", said the UM Rector to the awardees.

Find the past awardees below: