UCD Alumni Awardees 2024: Aengus Kelly, Dr Martín von Hildebrand, Dr Clíodhna Lyons, Dr Patrick Boland, Dr Emma Donoghue, Paul Gllen, Ciara Mageean, John O’Donnell SC, and Dr Patricia Scanlon.

Awards

Celebrating Excellence – at the UCD Alumni Awards 2024 nine exceptional alumni were recognised

The UCD alumni community is one of the University’s greatest assets, in terms of reputation and impact, and is filled with graduates blazing a trail in Ireland and around the world.

In October 2024, UCD President, Professor Orla Feely, hosted the UCD Alumni Awards. A highlight of the University calendar, it is a time when we celebrate the extraordinary talent and impact of nine exceptional UCD alumni. The awardees exemplify UCD’s values of intellectual curiosity, drive and ambition, and showcase the breadth and depth of our academic programmes.

The nine distinguished awardees recognised with Alumni Awards at the gala dinner in UCD’s O’Reilly Hall were: Dr Emma Donoghue, awardwinning novelist, screenwriter, and playwright (Arts and Humanities); Aengus Kelly, Executive Director and CEO of AerCap (Business); Dr Patrick Boland, world-leading orthopaedic surgeon (Health and Agricultural Sciences); John O’Donnell SC, barrister and award-winning poet and author (Law); Dr Clíodhna Lyons, an innovator and VP for Product and Service Planning at Nissan (Engineering and Architecture); Dr Patricia Scanlon, an AI pioneer (Research, Innovation and Impact); Paul Gillen, a global leader in the fight against cybercrime (Science); Dr Martín von Hildebrand, ethnologist and anthropologist (Social Sciences); and Ciara Mageean, Irish middle-distance runner and Olympic medallist (Sport).

We are grateful to our sponsors, the Institute of Banking, Medtronic, AerCap, Accenture, Nissan, and RKD, for making this celebration possible. To relive the evening, visit our YouTube channel @UCDAlumni1.