My Greystones: Martin Codyre

Read it and beep!

he first thing you feel when you sit down for a coffee with Martin Codyre is that, dang, it would have been fun to know this guy growing up.

For one thing, the man is smart. And not just street smart. 

You get the feeling that Martin Codyre would be well capable of combining a microwave and a jar of instant coffee to jump through the space-time continuum. Whilst sipping on a really, really hot mug of coffee.

Indeed, the man came on GG’s radar purely through the town’s new Monthly Innovation Meetups, a free gathering of like-minded souls who recognise the seemingly endless possibilities and ever-evolving opportunities that modern technology brings to our lives. Given just how much our daily lives have changed over the past five years – thanks, largely, to that crazy little thing called a smart phone – there’s a strong sense that the crappy Sky’s dodgy internet service is the only limit to what we can achieve.

Mind you, Eirshole is even worse.

This passion for technological exploration that gripped engineer, neuroscientist and entrepreneur Martin Codyre all started ten years ago, when an unlucky fall whilst being a dancing fool at a friend’s wedding resulted in a spinal cord injury that has confined Martin to a wheelchair ever since. As the man says on his Twitter feed, he’s now working towards ‘ending spinal cord injury ‘cos it sucks‘.

Just how Martin is working towards that end he explained to GG over a fascinating hour in Café Gray this week, his faithful lab sidekick, Hilda, nodding approval every now and then at yet another elaborate and impassioned explanation of just how technology is going to make us stronger, faster, smarter and, most of all, healthier.

You can find out more by popping along to Martin’s talk at Greystones library on Tuesday, April 17th at 7.15pm, where he will talk about his worldwide quest to find treatments for spinal cord injury, the broken scientific and biomedical establishment that he found himself a part of. Plus his decision to retrain as a neuroscientist, and the subsequent setting up of his own company, GiantLeap Biotechnology.

For those keen to find out more now, you can follow Martin on Twitter here, find out more about Tuesday’s talk on the Facebook event page here, and about Tony, Matt, Adam and the Wicklow Innovation gang here.