About Me
Science journalist in the EU bubble
The start
Growing up, I was obsessed with the water. Suffering with asthma attacks from a young age, the doctors told my parents that swimming was the best activity to strengthen my lungs. So my dad started taking me to the local swimming pool, and I took to it like a duck to water. Family holidays from then on required either a pool or the sea - and preferably both.
As I got older, I learned about climate change and environmental issues affecting our oceans. I learned that it wasn’t the healthy ecosystem that I imagined it to be.
I was a nerdy teenager - part of the Green Committee that ran around school trying to get people to switch off the lights and recycle. This was in 2001, when being eco-friendly wasn’t trendy like it is now!
When I graduated from secondary school, I enrolled in a BSc in Marine Science in NUI Galway. Here I fell in love with the ocean all over again - with Blackrock Pier just a short walk from campus, and opportunities to go diving and surfing on the weekends. The west coast of Ireland is beautiful, dramatic and wild, and for a while I was able to call that home.
While studying in Galway, I volunteered for the Irish Seal Sanctuary, and later did my final year thesis on molecular methods for extracting seal DNA. I was also extremely interested in the acoustic behaviour and social structure of marine mammals, which also made up part of my final year work.
I moved to Australia in 2012 to undertake a graduate programme in Marine Biology, where I dove on the Great Barrier Reef and saw first-hand some of the impacts of climate change. In lectures I learned about ever-more devastating research into the impacts of climate change. Why isn’t this all over the news, I wondered?
The middle
I decided that I wanted to bring these stories to the attention of news organisations. And what better way to do that, than to become a journalist? I travelled back to Ireland, enrolled in a Masters programme in journalism, and embarked on a new career. I spent several months working in the Irish Research Council and the Higher Education Authority of Ireland before I received an offer from the European Parliament to go to Brussels on a Robert Schuman scholarship.
In Brussels, I worked in the European Parliament for the internal magazine NewsHound. I wrote about environmental issues as much as I could, and I also volunteered for Internal Voices, the interns’ publication. After the Parliament, I was fortunate enough to secure another internship, this time with Horizon Magazine, the European Commission’s R&D magazine. I stayed on at Horizon Magazine for almost 2 years, as a junior editor. My journey then took me through a series of communications and advocacy roles in Brussels, mainly in the life sciences, health and innovation fields.
Now
I became a freelance science reporter and have since written for publications including New Scientist, Horizon Magazine, the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, DeHavilland, Science Business, the EU Observer, the European Science Communication Institute and more. I cover climate change, marine science, sustainability, energy and more. I volunteer with the Irish Science and Technology Journalists Association as the EUSJA Delegate. I also work with Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking as a communications writer and advise Humanitas Research Hospital on their communications strategy for Brussels and the EU.