UCC President: Reflecting on 180 years of excellence

2025 was a milestone year for us as we celebrated our 180th birthday.

From our modest beginnings with 23 dedicated teaching staff who sought to deliver excellence in education to Cork, to an institution with over 26,000 students from 140 countries, University College Cork’s growth has both reflected and actively driven the region’s own progress since the mid-1800s.

To look back on our history and celebrate our achievements, we have an exhibition running in our Boole Library which is open to the public. We warmly welcome the people of Cork to view this exhibition as for 180 years UCC has been an integral part of this community.

A global leader in sustainability

University College Cork is a global leader in sustainability. In 2025, we were ranked second across the globe in the UI GreenMetric World University Rankings for sustainability performance in Higher Education. We highlight these rankings to inspire action. It is incumbent on universities to lead and inspire the change we want to see in the world. The way we operate has changed significantly over the years and the passion of our students, staff, alumni, and communities has driven that change.

2025 also saw UCC climb to 246th in the world in one of the world’s leading higher education rankings, the QS World University Rankings, the rise comes on the back of a nineteen-place improvement in 2024. It is the third year in a row that UCC has climbed in the ranking. It is an achievement built on the hard work of our staff and excellence of our students, who have one of the highest graduate employability scores in Ireland.

Transforming our campus to be a visible representation of our community

Ever since our doors opened to students, our Aula Maxima has been a focal point for much university activity – student enrolment, exams, celebrations, concerts, launches, conferences and more. Its walls are adorned with beautiful portraits of our past Presidents – all men. This imbalance has done a disservice to the many brilliant women who have shaped the world in which we live today. In recent years throughout our campus we have brough the names of women who shaped our academic community to the fore, including Ellen Hutchins, Dora Allman, and Áine Hyland, Máire Mulcahy and Iris Ashley Cummins.

In November I was delighted to unveil, with our friends in Accenture and Business to Art, the result of our ‘Women on Walls’ initiative, the latest step on our journey to making our campus a place that better represents our society.

Now, the portraits of trailblazers such as Enda O’Brien, Catriona Twomey, Nano Nagle and Dr Naomi Masheti and more hang proudly with past presidents on the walls of our Aula Maxima.

While the unveiling marked the culmination of the Women on Walls project, it is not the end of our efforts to ensure UCC is a place where everyone feels represented. Last year we received our first silver award in the Athena Swan programme, the scheme that recognises commitment to advancing gender equality in higher education. We will continue to build on this progress.

Increasing our visibility on the global stage

We are a university with many brilliant students, academics, and researchers across a wide breadth of disciplines. We are rightly proud of them and their achievements, and want to share them with the world. That is why we launched our Global Engagement Plan last year, which will increase UCC’s international visibility. Though the world can seem a volatile place with many changing geopolitical factors, through promoting our plan’s core pillars of excellence, impact, partnership, and citizenship, we believe our plan will bring many benefits to the global profile of not just our university, but our city, region and country.

While we are constantly outwards looking in our strategy, we know too that we could not be where we are without the people of Cork, Munster and beyond, and are always looking to give back by opening our doors to the public.

With that in mind, it was with immense pride that we opened our ‘Domain of the Dinosaurs’ exhibit in the Glucksman Gallery. Running until April, it features nine life-sized dinosaur skeleton casts, over 250 fossils, and newly commissioned Irish art.

This exhibit is free to the public, with optional paid-for guided tours, and we really hope as many as possible will take the opportunity to come to this unique display of science, history and art.

We have achieved a lot in 2025, improving our rankings, strengthening our finances, and working harder to make our university an inclusive community in which we can all be proud.

We won’t rest with these achievements, but use them as our motivation to do more and do better in 2026.

On behalf of all of us in UCC I want to say thank you, and happy new year to all who contribute to our university – partners and friends across academia, industry and civic life and importantly our students, staff, and their families.