Trinity’s Cian Morgan wins 2026 Mary Mulvihill Award
Posted on: 21 May 2026
Medical student Cian Morgan won the €2,000 top prize in the annual science media competition for third-level students, while Aoibheann Kearins, who has just completed a BA in Physics at Trinity, received a €500 judges’ highly commended award.
Cian and Aoibheann received their awards at a special ceremony at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies this week.
The competition commemorates the late science journalist and author Mary Mulvihill (1959–2015). Now in its tenth year, this year’s competition invited entries on the theme of ‘Time’, an aspect of our existence that is difficult to define but which deeply pervades our lives and our experiences.
Cian Morgan, winner of the 2026 Award.
Cian’s winning entry, “The Cows of Carlow: A Conversation with My Grandad”, comprises an essay inspired by his own and his grandfather’s personal and historical reflections on the topic. He winds up his great-great grandfather’s old pocket watch, although he is at first unsure whether to do so in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction.
“Much to my delight, the dormant timepiece’s second hand comes to life, and the steady ticks of its mechanical heartbeat start to measure the passage of time once more,” he writes, with the focus on Dublin Mean Time, Ireland’s national standard time established in 1880 as some 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
“Meanwhile in Tullow, my great-great-grandfather’s hometown in Co. Carlow, there was no such sophisticated community timepiece. And so possession of a personal timepiece conferred considerable social status.” Yet most people ordered their day around a much looser conception of time – far removed from our current anxious preoccupation with minutes and seconds – and even the cows seemed to know what was the “right time”.
“I really liked it and found it really informative,” said Margaret Kelleher, Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, at UCD, who presented the awards. “Cian’s entry has many of the fine qualities of Mary’s work: it conveys substantial information in a way that is very accessible and engaging, and is very well researched.”
Aoibheann’s piece, called “Time for you, Time for me”, explores her personal experiences of time over the course of her life, as well as scientific and philosophical conceptions of time.
She writes about ‘dunamis’, Aristotle’s idea of potentiality: “Time allows ‘dunamis’ to unfold, the unrealised to become real”, and about Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which “shows that time is not universal”. General relativity adds gravity, she notes, and clocks tick differently in different gravitational fields. GPS satellites must take both into account to avoid significant errors: “Time is elastic, physical, and relational.”
Aoibheann is the second member of her family to feature among the prize-winners after her sister Aoife, another Trinity graduate who is currently pursuing a PhD on the history of mathematics at the University of Oxford, also received a highly commended award in 2020.
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