This fellowship aims to develop the career of the researcher to the point where he is in a very strong position to start his own research group and secure funding to do so. This will be achieved by complementing his existing scientific knowledge to give him a broad and well rounded-expertise on nanopore fabrication, characterisation and applications, giving him training in complementary skills such as proposal writing, teaching and management, allowing him to build collaborations and making him well-known throughout his research field through publications, collaboration and conference attendance. A second aim of the fellowship is to transfer back to the European Union the leading scientific expertise on characterisation, modelling and application of track-etched nanopores only available at the Siwy Research Group at the University of California Irvine, USA, and to build long term collaborative links from this group and institution to the return host, the Photodetection and Imaging Research Group at University College Cork, Ireland. The scientific research and training objectives for this fellowship focus on single nanopores of diameters 2–50 nm, which are currently being explored for a wide range of applications, from single-molecule DNA analysis to biotoxin sensing to creating ionic equivalents of electronic diodes and transistors. The specific objectives are a) to advance existing knowledge on track-etched nanopores by methodically characterising track-etched nanopore properties—essential for the commercial production of these nanopores that will soon be demanded as applications develop to the practical stage, b) to construct the first ever ionic circuits, based on the ionic diodes and transistors in development at the Siwy Research Group, and c) to develop an ionic diode based specific-sequence single molecule DNA sensor capable of detecting single DNA molecules with a specific sequence, at a rate much faster than competing techniques.