SBBS Pharmacology Student Wins 2025 Mary Mulvihill Award
🎉We are delighted to share that Simran Khatri, a Stage 3 Pharmacology student at our school, UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science (SBBS), has been named joint winner of the 2025 Mary Mulvihill Award, Ireland’s leading science media competition for third-level students 📰.
📝 Simran’s award-winning entry, In Life for Life – A Monologue from the Heart of a Young Researcher, is a powerful and deeply personal essay that reflects on the emotional and ethical dilemmas surrounding the use of animals in biological research 🐾🔬. Her writing was praised by the judges for its honesty, clarity, and thoughtful engagement with a complex topic.
💬 “ “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. It resonated with me… I deeply felt the honesty of it.”
— Prof. Kevin Mitchell, TCD, award judge
📚The award, named in memory of pioneering science journalist Mary Mulvihill, recognises outstanding talent in science writing and communication. This is the first time in the award’s nine-year history that two students have shared the top prize 🏆. Simran shares the award with Kevin O’Leary, a postgraduate geography researcher at Trinity College Dublin, who designed a biodiversity-focused card game titled Cascade – A Game for Saving Life as We Know It.
Originally from Indore, India, Simran has embraced the challenge of communicating science not just with clarity, but with courage and humanity. Her academic journey continues this summer as she travels to the United States as a Naughton Fellow. She will join Professor Kaiyu Fu’s lab at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where she will work on tumour organoid models and contribute to the development of an electrochemical biosensing system for therapeutic testing — an experience that bridges cutting-edge biomedical research with hands-on innovation.
👏 Congratulations to Simran on this exceptional achievement, and for using her voice to elevate empathy, ethics, and curiosity in science 💡💬.
🔗 Learn more about the Mary Mulvihill Award: (opens in a new window)https://marymulvihillaward.ie
Read Irish Times Article here: (opens in a new window)https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2025/05/22/students-from-ucd-and-tcd-are-joint-winners-of-2025-mary-mulvihill-science-media-competition/