‘I just follow the story’: A tenacious teacher and his passion for science

Eoin Murphy talks science communication, the Mary Mulvihill Award and how we’re all interconnected if you think about it.

A recent study has suggested that an ancestor of the T Rex first came to North America via a land bridge from Asia. Using mathematical modelling, a team led by University College London has concluded that tyrannosaurids likely crossed the Bering Strait between modern-day Siberia and Alaska around 70m years ago.

This Bering Strait land bridge has been the subject of much scientific interest and controversy, with some theories suggesting humans first arrived in North America – just like the tyrannosaurids – by crossing the strait, when sea levels were lower some 16,000 years ago.

More recent research suggests humans arrived much earlier via boats, but the history remains unclear.

For Eoin Murphy, looking at a painting of humans crossing this land bridge while he travelled and worked in Central America, inspired him to return to education to research genetics.

“I found myself being drawn towards this idea of the genetics in humans and how people migrate, how some people are more likely to have a certain disease or more resistance to certain things. And I kind of just started to get back into it,” Murphy tells SiliconRepublic.com.

Murphy already had a degree and a master’s in biochemistry and postgraduate diplomas in secondary-school teaching.

Having taught abroad for a few years, he returned to the University of Galway to research Huntington’s disease, a genetic condition that affects the cells in the brain. He looked at genetic editing to investigate potential treatments for the disease.

It was during this time that he developed an interest in science communication. He entered and won a few competitions communicating his research to general audiences, including Silicon Republic’s own ResearchFest in 2018. He did lots of scientific outreach events that year, including stand-up comedy – “loads of different things”, he says, and got a real taste for it.

After the master’s he knew he would return to teaching – science and maths are his subjects – but he wanted to continue with this newfound interest (and aptitude). “I knew I’d go back to my schoolwork and I’d be communicating, but it would be specific types of content. I was interested in telling stories beyond that,” he says.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, he took the opportunity to study for a master’s in science and health communication part time and fully online at Dublin City University, while continuing to live and work in Ennis.

Mary Mulvihill Award

It was during the master’s that he entered and won the Mary Mulvihill Award.

The theme that year was unsurprisingly ‘viruses’. Murphy created an audio documentary about the different experiences of Covid-19 among people in Ireland and Peru. He had read an article about casual labourers in Peru being laid off in the cities and returning to rural areas, and once again it was a powerful image that inspired his work.

“So, there was this picture of all of them basically being moved out of the city, along the highway, walking back to the villages. I thought, you know, it’s such a striking image that a virus can have this effect,” Murphy says.

“And I just wanted to tell the story about how Covid affected different people and different places differently. So, this was a story because of a scientific phenomenon, which was the virus and the spread globally, but it gave me a chance to tell a human story as well.”

Murphy is now on the committee of the Mary Mulvihill Award and he is very enthusiastic about its value.

“The idea is that it’s to commemorate and honour the work of Mary Mulvihill as a science communicator, journalist and broadcaster,” Murphy says.

“She was very active across a whole range of mediums of communication. And the idea behind this award is to not just honour her, but to encourage a new generation of people who may be coming from different fields, who may have different interests within science, and who maybe don’t necessarily see themselves as a journalist or a broadcaster, but they can contribute to [science communication].”

There are no restrictions on format or style, he explains, with past entries including not just journalistic articles but graphic novels, stories and audio documentaries like his own. “People have done all sorts of things,” he says.

“That’s, I think, at the heart of the award [because] Mary herself, you know, she experimented across different forms of communication,” he says. Her aim, as is the aim of the award, was to encourage people to tell science stories in new and creative ways. “There are so many ways to tell a story,” Murphy says.

Bridging science and storytelling

As he showed with his Covid documentary, Murphy is particularly interested in audio storytelling. He has a podcast series called Science Tales, which includes reporting on diverse topics.

I ask him if he’s inclined to focus on the areas of science he has a background in, but he says his main criterion is just that the topic is interesting. This is particularly important because he makes time to do this work around his day job and family life.

“I haven’t tried to pigeonhole myself,” he says. “I just follow the story.

“I enjoy getting really stuck into something and researching it.”

Hundreds of hours of reading and interviews can go into one short piece, but that’s all part of the process, he says. For example, a couple of years ago, he visited the Global Seed Vault which is in Svalbard, a remote island in the Arctic circle, and this inspired him to do a deep dive into the impact of biodiversity decline on global seed diversity and how groups across Ireland are saving seeds.

Does this extracurricular activity help him in his teaching?

Murphy thinks it probably does. He says it gives him a bigger picture outlook when it comes to what the pupils are learning, and this helps him tell stories about the science that help capture their interest and connect ideas together.

“I often think that if people had a better understanding of how all of this is interconnected, it might encourage people to interact with the world differently, to respect things a bit more.

“Because often we think of ourselves as totally separate from these things. But, you know, it’s all interlinked really.”

Next week, SiliconRepublic.com will publish an article by Murphy on the story of life, inspired by this year’s Mary Mulvihill Award theme. With the competition now closed, the awards ceremony will be held on Thursday, 22 May at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ballsbridge.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.