2013 Press Releases
UCC undergraduates recognised
UCC student Siobhán O’Connor picked up her Bram Stoker Gold Medal at a ceremony held in Dublin City Hall last week, in recognition of her stunning performance at The Undergraduate Awards (UA).
The 4th year B.Sc. Nursing student from Kanturk, Co. Cork was invited to attend after she won both the Irish category for Nursing and the overall award for that same category to boot. Her paper entitled ‘The scourge of chronic venous leg ulcers – is topical zinc the answer? A review of the literature’ will be published in the UA 2013 academic journal. Her essay joins 21 other contributions, selected from almost 4000 submissions in over 180 colleges and universities across 25 countries, as the best undergraduate contribution in each respective field.
Ms O’Connor developed the idea for the essay based on her coursework from a wound management module taught by Ms Siobhán Murphy, a lecturer in the School of Nursing & Midwifery at UCC. She also had a keen interest in wound care having spent an intensive week at a wound management clinic at the South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital, Cork working alongside Sinead Dennehy, a Clinical Nurse Specialist in wound care.
Jessica Kennedy from Dooradoyle, Co. Limerick was also recognised. She recently graduated from the Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy Department in UCC, and is currently working in Australia. She won the ‘Social Innovation’ category for her paper entitled ‘A Shift from Offline to Online: Adolescence, the Internet and Social Participation’.
Several more UCC students also emerged as winners in the shortlist round announced in September 2013, with eleven UCC students in total highly commended across seven of the categories. Life Sciences had the highest UCC representation, in which four UCC students were recognised, including Rebecca Neal, Oleksandr Nychyk, Louise O’Sullivan and Aileen Sweeney. Other categories with UCC students shortlisted included Business and Economics (Jesse Harrington), Law (Anne Marie Shea), Nursing and Midwifery (Siobhan O’Connor), Psychology (Conal Wrigley), Social Innovation (Pádraig de Rís and Jessica Kennedy) and Languages and Linguistics (Martina Viscardi).
Dr. Mae Jemison, a retired NASA astronaut who was the first African-American woman in space, delivered the keynote address at the event.
Ms O’Connor commented, “I was ecstatic to receive an international award for undergraduate nursing research. I have to say a massive thank you to my lecturer Siobhán Murphy in the School of Nursing & Midwifery at UCC who encouraged me to apply. As a winner of the Undergraduate Awards, I had the opportunity to attend a 3 day global summit in Dublin. It was an amazing experience as we got to listen to today’s thought leaders in diverse fields such as climate justice, politics and warfare, and innovation and entrepreneurism in STEM. We also participated in workshops at Google HQ and collaborated with other undergraduate students who won their respective fields to design our ideal university and address societal challenges such as equal access to education. The 2014 programme is now open so I would encourage all undergraduate students from any discipline to apply!”
The Undergraduate Awards is the only international pan-discipline academic awards programme in the world, in operation across the island of Ireland since 2009 and operating globally since 2011. It aims to recognise the best students in the world and to connect them to one another so as to encourage inter-disciplinary co-operation that also transcends borders.
The awards ceremony was the final event of the three-day UA Global Summit, which saw the winners from both the international and Irish categories attend a series of talks and workshops, delivered by acclaimed international field experts. The bulk of the Summit took place throughout the day on Thursday at Farmleigh House, after which the participants meet An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny.
The 2014 Undergraduate Awards Programme is now open for registrations and submissions. You can do so here: http://www.undergraduateawards.com/submit