A personal essay about the ethics of animal testing for research and a novel card game that highlights biodiversity loss were the winning entries this year.
University College Dublin student Simran Khatri and Trinity College Dublin student Kevin O’Leary are the joint winners of the 2025 science communication award, which was founded to honour the life and legacy of science journalist and author Mary Mulvihill.
It’s the first time in its nine-year history that the top prize at the Mary Mulvihill awards has gone to two entrants.
In a ceremony hosted by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies today (22 May), the winners have each received a cash prize of €2,000.
Khatri, who is from Indore, India, has just completed her third year of a BSc in pharmacology. She spent much of this year at the National University of Singapore researching mouse models of cardiovascular disease.
She wrote a personal essay titled ‘In life for life – A monologue from the heart of a young researcher’, about her passion for science and the unease she feels about the use of animals for testing in biological research.
In her essay, she writes about mice being prepared for an experiment:
“I watched their tiny bodies being weighed, marked and injected. I watched them twitch under anaesthesia. The lives that weighed 25g or so looked fragile, helpless and entirely at our mercy. And I realised then – science isn’t always clean glassware and elegant data. Sometimes, it’s heavier. Quieter. A little more alive than you’d expect.”
Trinity neuroscientist Dr Kevin Mitchell, one of the judges and host of the awards ceremony, said that he really felt the honesty of Khatri’s piece. “It really resonated with me.
“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.”
A game of life and death
O’Leary, who is from Dublin, is currently undertaking a PhD in geography. His project looks at the coastal geomorphology of the Malahide Estuary to better understand the effects of climate change on the coastal seascape.
His submission was a novel card game called ‘Cascade – A game for saving life as we know it’, which requires players to work together to maintain biodiversity across land, wetlands and marine ecosystems. The 95-card deck includes player roles such as conservationist and policymaker, various species, policies to protect the environment and various environmental disasters, including oil spills and plastic pollution. The rules of the game dictate that everyone wins or loses together– either biodiversity is maintained or there is total ecosystem collapse.
“I just thought it was really clever,” Mitchell said of the game.
“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.”
‘A poignant affair’
As well as prize-giving, the awards ceremony featured the annual Science@Culture talk, this year given by Dr Juliana Adelman, an assistant professor in history at Dublin City University, with a lecture titled ‘Science as culture, a historian’s perspective’, about how scientific ideas are part of the culture in which they are created.
Students from seven higher-education institutions across Ireland entered the competition this year, with submissions including illustrated essays, videos and manga, exploring diverse topics – from the history of DNA to drug research in marine organisms.
Anne Mulvihill, sister of Mary, said that the annual judging is “always a poignant affair”.
“Through 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 theme for this year was ‘life’ – a broad topic that allowed entrants to get creative. Eoin Murphy, a committee member and former winner of the award, said the freedom of style and content is a way of honouring Mary Mulvihill’s legacy.
“That’s, I think, at the heart of the award [because] Mary herself, you know, she experimented across different forms of communication,” he recently told SiliconRepublic.com. Her aim was to encourage people to tell science stories in new and creative ways.
“There are so many ways to tell a story.”
Murphy wrote a piece earlier this week inspired by the theme about the origins of life on Earth and pondered where we go next.
Last year’s winner was University of Limerick student Evanna Winters, who wrote an illustrated essay on the theme of ‘intelligence’, titled ‘A walk in the woods’, about the vast fungal network that extends beneath the forest floor.
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