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Vice President for Research & Innovation
Professor John F. Cryan is Vice President for Research & Innovation at University College Cork, where he holds the Chair in the Dept of Anatomy & Neuroscience and is also a Principal Investigator in APC Microbiome Ireland. A graduate of NUI Galway ( BSc Biochemistry, 1995; PhD Pharmacology, 1999), he was a visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. He spent four years in the pharmaceutical industry as a Lab Head with Novartis in Basel, Switzerland, prior to joining UCC in 2005 as a joint appointment between the new School of Pharmacy and the Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics. He became Full Professor and Head of Dept of Anatomy & Neuroscience in 2011. He served on UCC’s Governing Body from 2016 to 2021. He became a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2017 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Antwerp in 2018.
Prof Cryan has published over 575 peer reviewed publications across a range of high-profile journals (e.g. Science, Nature Aging, Lancet Neurology, Nature Reviews, Cell Metabolism, Neuron, PNAS, Molecular Psychiatry) and has a h-index of 132 (Google Scholar). He has earned in excess of 23 million Euro in research funding and has received many awards including a Research Award in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Utrecht University in 2013, the Tom Connor Distinguished Scientist Award from Neuroscience Ireland in 2017 and was named the inaugural UCC Scientist of the Year in 2012. He also received prestigious research awards from the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, British Association of Psychopharmacology, Neurobehavioral Teratology Society and European Behavioural Pharmacology Society. He is immediate Past-President of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society and has been recognised by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate as one of world’s most highly cited scientists in 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019 and again in 2020. He serves as Senior Editor of three journals - Neuropharmacology, Neurobiology of Stress and Nutritional Neuroscience, and is on the Editorial Boards of a further 15 journals and co-edited four books.
Professor Cryan has trained more than 40 PhD students to completion and more than 20 of his trainees have taken up academic posts around the world with many more having successful careers in industry. He was recognized with an Research Mentor Award from the American Gastroenterology Society in 2017. He has developed strong collaborations with the pharmaceutical, food and medical device industries being named on 11 patents and 3 licences and holds two commercialisation awards from UCC. Professor Cryan is a strong advocate for the value of increased education and public engagement of our research endeavours and has given high profile talks at TEDMED, Wired Health and The World Government Summit. He was named UCC Science Communicator of the Year in 2017 and is frequently featured in the global news media (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Sunday Times, Fox News, Nature and Der Spiegel in the past 2 years alone). He is co-author of the bestselling book “The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection” published by National Geographic which has already been translated into Chinese, Spanish and Polish.