TCD, UCD Students are joint winners of the 2025 Mary Mulvihill Award
– Simran Khatri, UCD, and Kevin O’Leary, TCD, both win €2,000 as they
share top prize in the science media competition
– ‘Life’ the theme of the 2025 Mary Mulvihill Award
DUBLIN, 22 May, 2025—University College Dublin student Simran Khatri and Trinity College
Dublin student Kevin O’Leary are the joint winners of the 2025 Mary Mulvihill Award, the science
media competition for third-level students that commemorates the legacy of science journalist and
author Mary Mulvihill (1959–2015). Each winner received a cash prize of €2,000 at a ceremony
hosted by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
‘Life’ was the theme for the 2025 award, offering entrants many ways to explore the topic. The judges
decided the two winning entries were both of such a high standard and so distinctive that selecting one
over the other was impossible. It’s the first time in the nine-year history of the competition that the
judges have awarded the top prize to two winners.
Simran’s entry, ‘In Life for Life – A Monologue from the Heart of a Young Researcher’, comprises a
deeply thoughtful and personal essay that explores the tensions between her passion for science and
her deep sense of unease with the use of animals in biological research. Her compassionate
observation of mice being prepared for an experiment captures her disquiet: “I watched their tiny
bodies being weighed, marked, and injected. I watched them twitch under anesthesia. The lives that
weighed 25g or so looked fragile, helpless, and entirely at our mercy. And I realized then—science
isn’t always clean glassware and elegant data. Sometimes, it’s heavier. Quieter. A little more alive
than you’d expect.”
Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience, TCD, who presented the awards
said: “As someone who has worked with animals, I’ve also had to try and balance the importance and
benefits of this kind of research with the serious ethical responsibilities and more personal moral
reservations that it entails. So it really resonated with me, and I deeply felt the honesty of it.
”Kevin O’Leary’s entry, ‘Cascade – A Game for Saving Life as we Know it’, is a highly original card
game that requires players to work cooperatively to maintain biodiversity across land, wetland, and
marine ecosystems. A single deck contains 95 cards, which encompass several categories, including:
roles for each player, such as a conservationist or a policymaker; the species present in each of the
ecosystems considered in the game; policy measures that aim to protect the environment; negative
impacts, such as oil spills or plastic pollution; public figures associated with combating climate
change, such as Mary Robinson and Greta Thunberg; and two ‘cascade cards’, which immediately
worsen a given situation when they are drawn. Kevin devised an intricate set of rules that dictate how
the game is played. There can be no individual winner. Either everyone wins, and biodiversity is
maintained, or total ecosystem collapse occurs, and everyone loses.
“I just thought it was really clever. It does a really good job of capturing the complexity of these
systems and the fact that you have complex human systems around them. And both are crucially
important,” said Prof. Mitchell, who is the author of two books, ‘Innate: How the Wiring of our
Brains Shapes Who We Are’ and ‘Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will’.
In all, students from seven colleges across Ireland contributed entries, which included essays,
illustrated essays, video, manga (Japanese animation). The subjects explored included marine
biodiversity, the history of DNA, and drug research in marine organisms.
Anne Mulvihill, also a member of the judging panel, said: “As Mary’s sister, the annual judging of the
award is always a poignant affair, though each year we have been impressed with the excellent
standard of the winning entries, and we know that Mary would have been an enthusiastic reader of
them and would have been delighted to meet with the winners.
The event also included the now annual Science@Culture talk, reviving a name that Mary had
introduced in 1995 for an email bulletin (later a blog) that kept readers abreast of a vast range of
scientific activities and events. Guest speaker Dr. Juliana Adelman, who is Assistant Professor in
History at Dublin City University, gave a talk titled ‘Science AS Culture, a Historian’s Perspective’,
in which she discussed how scientific ideas are part of the culture in which they are created. She
discussed the expansion of AI and vaccine scepticism in that context, and also explored attitudes to
animals in 19th century Dublin. It was an accepted scientific idea at the time that a meat diet was not
only superior to a non-meat diet but that it was necessary to civilisation.
The judges for the Mary Mulvihill Award 2025 were:
Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience, TCD
Karlin Lillington, Writer and retired Irish Times technology columnist
Anne Mulvihill, Sister of Mary Mulvihill
Simran Khatri – Bio
Simran Khatri, originally from Indore, India, has just completed her third year in the B.Sc.
Pharmacology program at University College Dublin. Though still an undergraduate, she has already
built a strong foundation in international research. She spent much of the past year at the National
University of Singapore as an exchange student, where she worked in the lab of Dr. Roshni Rebecca
Singaraja on mouse models of cardiovascular disease. Her time in the lab exposed her to the
complexities and the emotional weight that comes with animal research, which sparked a growing
interest in organoids. These three-dimensional, lab-grown cellular structures mimic human tissue and
are increasingly used as human-relevant alternatives in biomedical science. Keen to explore this area
of research, Simran will spend the coming summer in the United States as a Naughton Fellow at the
University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She will join Professor Kaiyu Fu’s lab to work on tumour
organoid models and contribute to the development of an electrochemical biosensing system for
therapeutic testing. Organoids offer more accurate models of human disease and have the potential to
reduce reliance on animal experiments, aligning with Simran’s commitment to ethical and innovative
approaches in biomedical research.
Kevin O’Leary – Bio
Kevin O’Leary, who is from Dublin, is currently in the second year of a PhD in Geography at Trinity
College Dublin. Under the supervision of Professor Iris Möller, he is conducting research on the
coastal geomorphology of the Malahide Estuary. His project entails the study of the interactions
between seagrass and salt marsh systems within the intertidal zone, the area covered by the sea at high
tide but exposed to the air at low tide. His research aims to better understand the joint response of
both systems to changing climatic conditions – considering them as part of a larger, connected
“coastal seascape”. Kevin has a B.A. (Mod) in Environmental Science from TCD and an M.Sc. in
Science Communication and Public Engagement from the University of Edinburgh.
The Mary Mulvihill Award
The Mary Mulvihill Award is a project of The Mary Mulvihill Association, an initiative established
by the family and friends of the late Mary Mulvihill (1959–2015) to honour her memory and her work
in science journalism, science communication and heritage, and to promote her legacy. It administers
and awards funds to support work that commemorates her work and its significance.
