22
Maynooth University
Paying it Forward Dr Katriona O’Sullivan beat the odds as a homeless teenage mother. Now she’s trying to change them. With generous philanthropic support and expertise from Microsoft, the tech giant and MU lecturer have partnered on a series of outreach-focused STEM innovations – with real-life impacts on the line.
D
reamSpace is the name of the €5 million immersive STEM education hub Microsoft Ireland opened at its Leopardstown campus in 2018. Maynooth University is one of the leading research partners in the project, with Dr Katriona O’Sullivan at the helm.
Space to dream, however, is not something Katriona herself had much of as a child. “There’s poverty and there’s underneath poverty. That’s where my family was,” she said. Katriona had a baby at 16 and found herself homeless, living in a hostel in Birmingham. Eventually she followed her Irish parents back to Summerhill in Dublin, where she worked the overnight shift as a cleaner in Connolly Station. “I had no prospects, none that I knew at the time anyway. I was always bright, but no one in my family was educated. Education wasn’t valued. You don’t know anyone who is educated and you don’t value it. It becomes an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality.” It was then Katriona said she “accidentally stumbled on education” through a friend in the Trinity Access Programme. “So I marched into the Trinity Access Office straight away and
asked, ‘How do I get into this?’” From there, her world changed. “I never felt so special as I did in a classroom. My brain opened. It was my first sense of self-esteem.” Although Katriona said she felt isolated at Trinity for a long time, she was grateful for the opportunity. “I eventually realised that access to education, and to technology, was access to living really and it’s a right we all have. I spent many years feeling like I was a charity case.” That she was not. Katriona graduated with a first and secured a funded PhD in Psychology. What followed was a series of positions, including a post-doc at the Trinity Access 21 project. “This is when I began to come into my own as an academic, and as a human being really.” She partnered with Google on the company’s Trinity Access 21 Programme and found that while she enjoyed teaching, she loved research and working with industry to apply that research and bring it to real people. “I found my home in making sure people like me got access to education, by finding partners and making sure that what we’re learning gets out there into society.” In 2017, she made the move to Maynooth University to coordinate a new programme called Turn to Teaching aimed at diversifying teacher education in Ireland.
