UCD student is 2022 winner of the Mary Mulvihill Award

University College Dublin postgraduate student Samantha Tobias is the 2022 winner of the Mary Mulvihill Award.

The science media competition, now in its sixth year, is for third-level students and commemorates the legacy of science journalist and author Mary Mulvihill.

Ms Tobias’s entry was an illustrated essay on rising sea levels that threaten the island archipelago of Vegaøyan off the western coast of Norway. She is a native of Munich in Germany and a student on UCD’s Master’s Programme in World Heritage Management and Conservation.

This year’s competition invited entries on the theme of water, which has such profound importance for life on planet Earth. Students from 10 colleges around Ireland submitted entries for the €2,000 prize.

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Vegaøyan (or Vega) is a Unesco World Heritage site; a precious cultural landscape and seascape, comprising thousands of islands, islets and reefs. The region has a continuous history of human habitation for more than 10,000 years. Its inhabitants combine fishing, farming and the distinctive practice of harvesting the down of eider ducks, for which they build special nesting houses.

Rising sea levels and associated coastal flooding threaten to upset the area’s delicate balance and undermine the viability of its 222 bird species and rich marine biodiversity.

“The negative impact of climate change on the ecosystem will start a cumulative chain reaction: A decrease in eider duck populations will threaten the traditions around the down collection, and the changing ecosystem will limit fishing and farming opportunities,” Tobias wrote.

“Samantha’s entry was such a strong piece of work,” said Prof Fiona Regan of DCU Water Institute, a member of the judging panel. “It was thorough, technically sound and displayed a nice grasp of several disciplines.”

Rodger Clery, a first-year science student at UCD from Kilmallock, Co Limerick, received the judges’ €500 highly commended award for a short animated film, A Beginner’s Guide to Water, which deftly explains everything about water from the atomic level to the planetary scale.

“In terms of explaining the hydrological cycle, Rodger’s entry is as good as it gets,” said judge Nigel Monaghan, keeper of the National Museum of Ireland — Natural History. Other judges for the 2022 award were Irish Times tech journalist Karlin Lillington and Anne Mulvihill, sister of Mary Mulvihill.

The prize-giving ceremony was hosted by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies on Wednesday. The event also included the first annual Science@Culture talk, reviving a name Mulvihill had introduced in 1995 for an email bulletin — later a blog — that kept readers abreast of a vast range of scientific activities and events. Academic and science communicator Brian Trench, who gave the talk, discussed aspects of science’s situation in culture, including the metaphors used in scientific language, the attention given by artists and writers to scientific ideas and the presence of science and scientists in popular and everyday culture.