Martin Codyre suffered a devastating spinal-cord injury in August 2008 at the age of 33 at a wedding in Ireland that left him paralysed from the shoulders down. The 'Martin Codyre Fund' was immediately set up by his friends and family to support him through his recovery and rehabilitation and onwards to wherever his recovery would take him.
As time went on and his physical and emotional health and living conditions stabilised he unfortunately regained no meaningful function and still requires 24-hour care and incurs significant medical and rehabilitation costs on an ongoing basis. Technically he has a C5 complete spinal-cord injury.
The fund was initially about survival and still is to some extent but Martin has now made it also about his bigger vision, a vision he has had from within hours of having his accident. That audacious vision is about:
“Playing a significant role in ending paralysis due to spinal cord injury, regaining his own independence and ultimately walking again!"
Martin believes passionately that it is only through the intimate involvement in the entire bench to bedside pipeline of those with true ‘skin in the game’ and technical expertise like himself will treatments to reverse paralysis be found for SCI.
Givien his entrepreneurial and business backgrounds Martin likens donations to this fund as seed investments that are allowing him to develop the education, experience and connections that will be required to either join with or create separate and larger globally collaborative and open entities that will significantly move the dial towards ending spinal-cord injury.
Whilst no monies raised via this trust go directly to fund laboratories working on spinal-cord injury research the money raised facilitates Martin in working on boards such as the Unite 2 Fight Paralysis Advocate Research Committee where he assists in helping other foundations and philanthropists around the world in allocating their sometimes significant resources to efficiently work towards treatments that will reverse chronic spinal-cord injury.
A very brief summary of Martin's education and employment background is: Martin was awarded an Honours Degree in Mechanical Engineering from University College Dublin in Ireland and at the time of his injury was running his own start-up firm creating, and competing in, the nascent mobile live-streaming and reality entertainment sector in New York City. Prior to that he had worked for ten years in the algorithmic and high frequency trading space in NYC. You can find out more about this area by viewing his LinkedIn profile or contacting him directly.
To support intelligent funding decisions when it comes to spinal cord injury research in the last year Martin has:
- Travelled over 200,000 miles in 2012 alone attending neuroscience conferences and visiting labs all over the world
- Recently finished auditing the neuroscience module of the Trinity medicine course here in Dublin.
- Sits on the board of directors of the Irish Stem Cell Foundation