University College Dublin student Simran Khatri and Trinity College Dublin postgraduate researcher Kevin O’Leary are joint winners of the 2025 Mary Mulvihill Award.
The winners of the science media competition for third-level students, commemorating the legacy of science journalist Mary Mulvihill, received a prize of €2,000 at a ceremony hosted by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies on Thursday.
“Life” was this year’s theme. It is the first time in the competition’s nine-year history that there have been joint winners.
Khatri, who is originally from Indore, India, is studying pharmacology. Her entry, In Life for Life – A Monologue from the Heart of a Young Researcher, is a deeply thoughtful and personal essay exploring the tensions between her passion for science and her deep sense of unease with the use of animals in biological research, the judges said.
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Awards judge Kevin Mitchell, associate professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at TCD, 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.”
O’Leary is from Dublin and is undertaking a PhD in geography. His entry, Cascade – A Game for Saving Life as We Know It, is an original card game requiring players to work co-operatively to maintain biodiversity across land, wetland and marine ecosystems.
A single deck contains 95 cards, which encompass several categories including roles such as a conservationist or a policymaker for each player, the species present in each of the ecosystems considered, policy measures that aim to protect the environment, negative impacts such as oil spills or plastic pollution and public figures associated with combating climate change including Mary Robinson and Greta Thunberg. There are also two cascade cards, which immediately worsen a given situation when drawn.
With an intricate set of rules, 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,” added Prof Mitchell.
Anne Mulvihill, also a member of the judging panel with technology writer and Irish Times contributor Karlin Lillington, 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 [who died in 2015] would have been an enthusiastic reader of them and would have been delighted to meet with the winners.”
