Geography PhD Candidate Kevin O'Leary Wins 2025 Mary Mulvihill Award
Kevin O’Leary, a second-year PhD candidate in Geography at Trinity College Dublin's School of Natural Sciences, has been named co-winner of the prestigious 2025 Mary Mulvihill Award. This science media competition honours the legacy of renowned science journalist and author Mary Mulvihill (1959–2015).
O'Leary shares the €2,000 cash prize with Simran Khatri from University College Dublin. The awards were presented at a ceremony hosted by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Under the supervision of Professor Iris Moeller at Trinity, Kevin's research focuses on the coastal geomorphology of the Malahide Estuary. He investigates the intricate interactions between seagrass and salt marsh systems within the intertidal zone, aiming to understand their combined response to changing climatic conditions as part of a larger "coastal seascape."
The theme for the 2025 award was "Life," and O'Leary's winning entry, "Cascade – A Game for Saving Life as we Know it," captivated the judges. This highly original cooperative card game challenges players to work together to maintain biodiversity across land, wetland, and marine ecosystems.
The game features a 95-card deck with categories like player roles (e.g., conservationist, policymaker), species, environmental policy measures, negative impacts (e.g., oil spills), public figures in climate change, and "cascade cards" that worsen situations. O'Leary devised an intricate set of rules where the outcome is collective: either everyone wins by maintaining biodiversity, or everyone loses due to total ecosystem collapse.
"I am delighted to win this year's Mary Mulvihill award," said Kevin O'Leary. "As a scientist, I believe that our knowledge is limited only by our ability to share it, and we are continuously seeking new ways to do this. It is truly an honour to be acknowledged by an organisation which promotes such creative forms of science communication. Cascade is designed to reflect our need to work together to combat the climate crisis and all its complex challenges. While the game is full of facts about the natural world, it is the cooperation and discussions which it creates that I am most proud of."
Professor Iris Moeller praised O'Leary's achievement: "I am so very delighted to see one of our post-graduate researchers in Geography win this award. The creativity and enthusiasm of many of our researchers never ceases to amaze me and Kevin has managed to combine both with a very innovative way of communicating the intricate connections of life on our planet. A much-needed contribution at a time of such a multitude of environmental and societal challenges."
Prof. Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity, who presented the awards, remarked on O'Leary's entry: "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.”
This marks the first time in the nine-year history of the Mary Mulvihill Award that the top prize has been awarded to two winners, with the judges finding both entries of such high and distinctive quality that separating them was impossible.
Students from seven Irish colleges submitted entries this year, spanning essays, illustrated essays, video, and manga, exploring diverse subjects such as marine biodiversity, the history of DNA, and drug research in marine organisms.
Anne Mulvihill, Mary Mulvihill's sister and a member of the judging panel, shared her sentiments: “As Mary's sister, the annual judging of the award 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.”