The National University of Ireland (NUI), Galway, is a research-led university with internationally recognised expertise in selected priority areas. NUI Galway has a distinguished reputation for teaching and research excellence. This reputation is reflected in our performance in various University League Tables. In 2009 NUI Galway was named the Sunday Times University of the Year for 2009/10. Much of the research is translational; NUI Galway has developed excellent research and development collaborations with national and multi-national industry partners. NUI Galway is Ireland's leading University for knowledge transfer with more spin-out companies, licenses and patents created in the last three years than any other Irish university.

With over 17,000 students and more than 2,200 staff, NUI Galway has a distinguished reputation for teaching and research excellence in the fields of arts, social science, and Celtic studies; business, public policy and law; engineering and informatics; medicine, nursing and health sciences; and science. NUI Galway offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and diplomas of international standard, which provide students with opportunities for personal and academic development, as well as giving them the knowledge and skills they need to pursue successful careers.

NUI hosts the Bio-Inspired Electronics and Reconfigurable Computing (BIRC) research group which develops low power, scalable embedded bio-inspired hardware, FPGA prototype implementations and apps. The BIRC research group has developed a number of FPGA-based Network on Chip (NoC)-based hardware Spiking Neural Network (SNN) prototypes, hardware SNN training, configuration and readback platform, and benchmark SNN control and classification applications. Architectural challenges have included scalable, hierarchical NoC design using cluster and ring topologies and minimisation of topology memory, reduction of NoC-based spike latency jitter, application development (including robotics and breast cancer classification problems), host-hardware SNN interface development, and Genetic Algorithm-based SNN training. The BIRC research group has successfully collaborated and published results with the ISRC at the University of Ulster for the past four years.