Welcome from Professor J.R.T. Greene - Chair and Head of Department

I am pleased to welcome you to the Department of Anatomy at University College Cork.   The College was founded in 1849 with a combined Chair in Anatomy and Physiology but there has been a Professor of Anatomy since 1907.  Today we provide high quality teaching and engage in cutting-edge research.  Our activities are informed by the latest advances and make full use of modern techniques.  I’m sure that my predecessors would recognize many aspects of our current activity but they might be surprised by extent to which our discipline has developed.

The Department has a strong focus on research and is particularly interested in neural development, and the mechanisms that underlie conditions of the nervous system - including Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, epilepsy and prion disease.  We use advanced techniques in microscopy, molecular and cell biology, electrophysiology and behavioural science.  Increasingly, these approaches are combined in multidisciplinary studies of the biological questions that interest us.  Ultimately, our aim is to propose new approaches to treating these diseases that are more effective and safer than those available currently.

The Department is also proud of its role in running and contributing to the undergraduate degree in neuroscience at UCC - the first such degree in the Irish Republic.  A more venerable, but equally important, aspect of our work entails teaching clinical anatomy to students of medicine (in undergraduate and graduate-entry courses), dentistry and allied profession.  We also provide specialist short courses for medical graduates at all stages of their careers.   Naturally, all of our teaching is informed by subject-based and pedagogic research.

We are constantly developing our facilities to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future.  Currently our most significant capital project is the construction of a world-class Clinical Anatomy and Surgical Training Centre, where we will combine the best forms of computer aided learning with clinical simulations and traditional, cadaver-based, approaches to anatomy teaching.

I hope that you will find the following pages interesting and thank you for visiting our website.

Professor JRT Greene, BSc, PhD, MB BS, MBA

Chair in Anatomy and Head of Department