Katriona O'Sullivan

Katriona O’Sullivan is an associate professor at Maynooth University, a psychologist and memoirist. Her memoir - Poor - debuted at #1 on the Irish Non-Fiction bestseller list, remaining there for 54 weeks. It won the Bookselling Ireland Biography of the Year Award and the Last Word Listeners’ Choice Award at the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2023. It also won Eason's Book of the Year and the Ian Dempsey Show Book of the Year.

A memoir of growing up in extreme poverty, Poor describes the far-reaching impact of childhood poverty. As one of five children in a home shaped by her parents' heroin addiction, Katriona's story chronicles her journey from poverty, teenage pregnancy, homelessness to graduating with a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and becoming an award-winning lecturer whose work challenges barriers to education.

Katriona leads the STEM Passport for Inclusion project, an initiative which supports working-class girls to become STEM Prepared. This project has won national and international acclaim, including European Gender Equality Project of the Year and IBEC Women in STEM Initiative of the Year 2023. She has also led initiatives that tackle inequality in education, including a research programme which established the impact of the Foundation Year in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University.

Katriona has been invited speaker at the United Nations, the World Education Forum, the European Gender Action Workshop and the UN Gender Equality workshop. She has worked with policy makers in Ireland and Scotland to develop policies around education and inclusion and has published research on equality, gender, education, inclusion and STEM.