Mark's Journey
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1994 - 1998
Mark captained Dublin University Boat Club, rowed for Ireland, and had a job offer waiting in London. Life was on track.
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1998
In his final year at Trinity College Dublin, Mark suddenly lost his sight, weeks before his final exams: the first unexpected challenge that he had to decide how to respond to.
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2002
Four years after losing his sight, Mark returned to the boat, winning silver and bronze at the Commonwealth Rowing Championships for Northern Ireland.
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2003
Unbroken by blindness, Mark became an adventure athlete, running six marathons in seven days across the Gobi Desert in China with his friend Nick Wolfe.
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2004
On the sixth anniversary of losing his sight, Mark became the first blind person to complete the North Pole Marathon, racing with John O'Regan on the frozen Arctic Ocean.
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2005 - 2006
Mark attempted New Zealand's Coast to Coast twice. Both years, the boulder-strewn mountain run beat him, and he missed the time cut-off and was helicoptered off the mountain. The lesson: prepare properly, and make sure the event is right for you. Mark completed the Zurich Ironman in Switzerland with Brendan Smyth and, two weeks later, kayaked across the Irish Sea from Wales to Ireland.
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2007
Racing with John O'Regan, Mark became the first blind person to complete the world's lowest and highest marathons: the Dead Sea Ultra in Jordan, then the Everest Marathon in Nepal a month later.
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2009
Ten years after losing his sight, Mark raced across Antarctica with Simon O'Donnell and Inge Solheim. After 43 days in temperatures as low as minus 50 degrees, he became the first blind person to race to the South Pole.
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2010
In 2010, four weeks before Mark and Simone George were due to marry, a fall from a second-storey window nearly killed him. Paralysis was added to blindness.
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2011
After 16 months in hospital, Mark committed his paralysed body to experimental research, exploring the intersection where humans and technology collide. Mark founded Run in the Dark. Each November until 2024, more than 250,000 people in 50 cities ran wearing red flashing armbands to raise funds to cure paralysis.
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2012
Mark took his first robotic steps in an Ekso Bionics exoskeleton in San Francisco. He went on to become the company's longest-serving test pilot, stress-testing new designs and taking over 1.5 million steps from his base in Dublin over the following decade. Mark was selected as one of the first ambassadors for Wings for Life, the global foundation funding research to cure spinal cord injury.
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2013
At UCLA, Mark combined electrical stimulation of his spinal cord with walking in a robotic exoskeleton, a combination never attempted before. He voluntarily moved his leg for the first time since the accident, work he then replicated and continued at Trinity College Dublin through to the present day.
Mark joined the board of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation in the United States, serving for a decade alongside its work to cure spinal cord injury.
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2014
By 2014, Mark's story was captured in “Unbreakable”, an award-winning documentary six years in the making. Following Mark and Simone George, it spans blindness, catastrophic injury, and the search for a cure.
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2016
Using transcutaneous spinal stimulation, Mark stood independently, a moment captured in The Space Between Skeleton and Skin, an award-winning Newstalk radio documentary made with Jonathan McCrea.
Mark put curing paralysis on the world stage at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, speaking on the human dimension of the fourth industrial revolution, and joined the WEF's Global Futures Council on Human Enhancement.
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2018
Mark and Simone George took the TED stage together in 2018, speaking about shared resilience, resolving the tension between acceptance and hope, and catalysing collaborations to cure paralysis.
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2019
With multiple partners, Mark launched the Exoskeleton Access Programme at Dublin City University in 2019, giving people living with paralysis, stroke, and MS affordable access to robotic walking.
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2020
Mark founded Collaborative Cures, which he chairs, to bring together the scientists, technologists, and investors needed to cure paralysis in our lifetime.
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2023
It started with Mark's election to the WEF's Forum of Young Global Leaders a decade earlier. The relationships he and Simone built through that network have catalysed collaborations worth over $150 million in neurotech projects to cure paralysis.
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2026
Now pursuing a Professional Doctorate in Elite Performance at Dublin City University, Mark is testing his Unbreakable Framework to understand why, when the challenge chooses them, some people sit on the sidelines while others step into the arena.
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2026 - present day
Mark continues to train, combining adapted CrossFit with walking in his Ekso Bionics exoskeleton and using a spinal cord stimulator that has moved from experimental research to commercially available technology.