Mayo student wins prestigious Science Communication Award

University of Limerick student Evanna Winters, a native of Castlebar, is the 2024 winner of the €2,000 Mary Mulvihill Award, the science media competition for third-level students that commemorates the legacy of science journalist and author Mary Mulvihill (1959–2015).

Róisín Ferguson, a student at Trinity College Dublin, received the judges’ highly commended award, which includes a cash prize of €500.

Evanna, who has just completed a B.Sc. in Bioscience, is the competition’s first winner from the University of Limerick.

She won the top prize for an evocative, beautifully illustrated essay, ‘A Walk in the Woods’. It explores the workings of the ‘wood wide web’, the subterranean fungal network that extends beneath the forest floor.

This extensive system exhibits a vital form of interconnectivity and communication, which challenges our conventional understanding of intelligence.

“Despite not having a central nervous system or brain,” she writes, “fungi display their intelligence through their vast mycelial networks, signalling patterns and their symbiotic relationships.”

At a microscopic level, she notes, mycelia “not only look like the neurons of a human brain they act like them too”.

To communicate, they send electrical impulses and electrolytes through the network; and some studies have found that fungal electrical signalling resembles patterns of human speech.

Now in its eighth year, this year’s competition invited entries on the theme of ‘Intelligence’, which encompasses both the cognitive abilities that humans and other living beings possess and the rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which combines great promise across many different areas of innovation with great threat.

As is customary, students were encouraged to address the topic in scientific or imaginative terms, and in any format. The submissions received reflected the wide-ranging nature of the topic.

They included photography, essays, videos, audio pieces, and combinations of several formats. The areas covered included biological computing, AI, intelligence and genetics, and the ethical and ecological consequences of our narrow conceptualisation of intelligence.