2025 Winners
Paul Sherwood Photographer paul@sherwood.ie 00 353 87 230 9096 Pictured: Kevin O’Leary (TCD) Joint Winner.
Paul Sherwood Photographer paul@sherwood.ie 00 353 87 230 9096
Simran Khatri (UCD), joint winner
For the first time there were two winners of the Mary Mulvihill award this year; the judges were unable to decide between two excellent entries, so it was decided the give the full award to both.
Simran Khatri, UCD;
Kevin O’Leary, TCD
Simran Khatri and Kevin O’Leary are joint 2025 winners, each receiving €2,000, 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).
Simran’s entry was an essay about the conflict between her love of science and her concern about the use of animals in biological research. Read Simran’s essay ‘In Life for Life– A Monologue from the Heart of a Young Researcher’.
Kevin’s entry was a card game, ‘Cascade – A Game for Saving Life as we Know it’, is described in the press release below.
About the Award
Now in its ninth year, this year’s competition invited entries on the theme of ‘Life’.
The prize-giving ceremony was hosted by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The event also included the fourth annual Science@Culture talk, sponsored by the Irish Times, 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. This year’s talk, entitled “Science AS Culture” was given by Dr Juliana Adelman in the School of History and Geography, Dublin City University.
Watch the Science@Culture talk here: 2025 award ceremony
Watch the award ceremony here: 2025 Science@Culture talk
Paul Sherwood Photographer paul@sherwood.ie 00 353 87 230 9096
Mary Mulvihill Awards 2025 at DIAS, Dublin
May 2025
Press Release
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.
