Special Olympics is the world's largest sports organization for children and adults with intellectual disabilities providing year-round training and activities to 5 million participants and Unified Sports partners in 172 countries. Special Olympics competitions are held daily, all around the world—including local, national and regional competitions, adding up to more than 100,000 events a year. Like the International Paralympic Committee, the Special Olympics organization is recognized by the International Olympic Committee; however, unlike the Paralympic Games, its World Games are not held in the same year nor in conjunction with the Olympic Games.
Sir John Foster Wilson CBE was a British public health advocate, best known for working to prevent blindness in developing countries in Africa and South and South East Asia.
Christian Blind Mission (CBM) is an international Christian development organization, committed to improving the quality of life of persons with disabilities in the poorest communities of the world. It is considered one of the world's oldest and largest organizations working in this field.
Catherine Day is a former European civil servant from Ireland. Appointed in November 2005 as Secretary-General of the European Commission, she served two terms with President Jose Manuel Barroso and continued with his successor, Mr Jean-Claude Juncker until she retired in September 2015. She was the first woman to hold the post of Secretary General of the European Commission.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is an Irish poet and academic. She was the Ireland Professor of Poetry (2016–19).
Amar Latif is a Scottish entrepreneur, television personality and professional traveller. His blindness is due to the incurable eye condition retinitis pigmentosa. By his late teens he had 95 per cent sight loss.
Patricia Rosarie Casey is an Irish psychiatrist, academic, journalist and conservative commentator on social issues. She is Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin and consultant psychiatrist at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, Dublin. She is known for her regular column with the Irish Independent newspaper, and her conservative views on a variety of social issues.
Mark Pollock is an international motivational speaker, explorer, and author from Ireland who became the first blind man to race to the South Pole. As part of a three-man team called South Pole Flag, alongside Simon O'Donnell and Inge Solheim he took 43 days in January 2009 to complete the Amundsen Omega 3 South Pole Race. Pollock asserted his disability had slowed him down but they finished fifth overall from the six teams that finished the race. He had participated against nine other teams, including that of BBC personality Ben Fogle and the Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell, a friend of Pollock. An avid rower Pollock has won bronze and silver medals at the 2002 Commonwealth Rowing Championships in Nottingham, England and has also written a book titled Making It Happen. Around 2020, he was involved in the creation of Collaborative Cures.
Sightsavers is an international non-governmental organisation that works with partners in developing countries to treat and prevent avoidable blindness, and promote equality for people with visual impairments and other disabilities. It is based in Haywards Heath in the United Kingdom, with branches in Sweden, Norway, India, Italy, Republic of Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, and the US.
Yvonne Farrell is an Irish architect and academic. She is the co-founder, together with Shelley McNamara, of Grafton Architects, which won the World Building of the Year award in 2008 for their Bocconi University building in Milan. The practice won the inaugural RIBA International Prize in 2016 for their Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología building in Lima, Peru, and was awarded the 2020 Royal Gold Medal. In 2017 she was appointed, along with Shelley McNamara, as curator of the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2018. She won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2020, also with McNamara.
University College Dublin is a public research university in Dublin, Ireland, and a member institution of the National University of Ireland. With 38,417 students, it is Ireland's largest university, and amongst the most prestigious universities in Europe. Five Nobel Laureates are among UCD's alumni and current and former staff. Additionally, four Taoisigh and three Irish Presidents have graduated from UCD, along with one President of India.
Naoisé O'Reilly is a psychology expert who develops methods in the areas of expression and psychological profiling. She earned a PhD in physical oceanography from the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom in 2007. The British Library catalogued her PhD dissertation entitled Combining Altimetry and Hydrography with Inverse Methods. Outlined as one of the conclusions, O'Reilly developed an oceanography satellite altimetry and argo float big data scientific research system to analyse the state of the north Atlantic Ocean in three dimensional surface elevations. She graduated from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2000 with a first class honours degree in marine science. She studied quantitative Earth observations at the University of Oxford and geophysical and environmental fluid dynamics at the University of Cambridge in 2002.
UCD Women's Soccer Club is an Irish association football club based in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown. It is the women's association football team of University College Dublin. Founded in 1966, UCD are one of the oldest women's football clubs in the Republic of Ireland. Like the UCD men's team, the women's football team has competed in national competitions, such as the FAI Women's Cup and the Women's National League, as well as intervarsity competitions. UCD has also represented the Republic of Ireland in the UEFA Women's Cup. Between 2014 and 2018, following a merger, with DLR Waves, the club played in the Women's National League and FAI Women's Cup as UCD Waves. However, in 2018 UCD withdrew from the WNL. DLR Waves was subsequently revived as a separate club, taking UCD Waves' place in the WNL.
Alaa Murabit M.D. is a Libyan-Canadian physician who has been serving as director of global health advocacy and communications at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Caroline Elinor Hussey was an Irish microbiologist and academic. She served as president of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) from 1989 to 1992. In 1994 she sat on the Expert Group investigating the circumstances of the 1977 contamination with Hepatitis C of the Blood Transfusion Service Board's Anti-D product. In the same year she was appointed the first female registrar and deputy president of University College Dublin (UCD) and remained in that post until her retirement in 2004. She was Chairperson of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment from 1995 to 2000.
Norah Casey is an Irish businesswoman, magazine publisher, television personality and broadcaster from Dublin, Ireland.
Aoife McLysaght is an Irish geneticist and a professor in the Molecular Evolution Laboratory of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.
Jane Ohlmeyer,, is a historian and academic, specialising in early modern Irish and British history. She is the Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin and Chair of the Irish Research Council, which funds frontier research across all disciplines.
Nidhi Goyal is an Indian disability and gender rights activist who has been appointed to the UN Women Executive Director's advisory group. Goyal is the founder and executive director of Mumbai-based NGO Rising Flame and works in the areas of sexuality, gender, health and rights for women and girls with disabilities. She is also a stand-up comedian.
Emma Caroline Teeling is an Irish zoologist, geneticist and genomicist, who specialises in the phylogenetics and genomics of bats. Her work includes understanding of the bat genome and study of how insights from other mammals such as bats might contribute to better understanding and management of ageing and a number of conditions, including deafness and blindness, in humans. She is the co-founder of the Bat1K project to map the genomes of all species of bat. She is also concerned with understanding of the places of bats in the environment and how to conserve their ecosystem.
