APC News
Prof John Cryan appointed as UCC’s Vice President for Research and Innovation
Prof John Cryan appointed as UCC’s Vice President for Research and Innovation
Prof John Cryan appointed as UCC’s Vice President for Research and Innovation
Congratulations to John Cryan, Principal Investigator in APC Microbiome Ireland, who has been appointed as UCC’s new Vice President for Research and Innovation.
John is a PI in APC’s Brain-Gut-Microbiome Research Theme since 2005 and has been an active voice in our Executive Management Group. Together with APC PI Ted Dinan, a clinical psychiatrist, they led the then nascent field of microbiome-gut-brain interactions and their ground-breaking discoveries led to a paradigm shift in the neuroscience and psychiatry fields, showing how brain health and state of mind are intimately connected to your microbiome. This has clear translational impact, and they coined the term “Psychobiotics†which are live organisms (bacteria) that, when ingested in adequate amounts, produce a health benefit in patients suffering from psychiatric illness. John has published over 550 peer reviewed publications across a range of high-profile journals (e.g. Science, Lancet Neurology, Nature Reviews, Cell Metabolism, Neuron, PNAS, Molecular Psychiatry) and has a h-index of 125 (Google Scholar) with >62,000 citations.  He has won in excess of €23million in competitive research funding and collaborates with many industry partners from the food, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors to translate his research. He is an inventor on 11 patents and 3 licences and won two UCC commercialisation awards. John has trained over PhD students to completion, and many have taken up senior roles in in academic and industry around the world.
John is a loud advocate of the importance of public engagement in research and in breaking down barriers between disciplines. He co-curated the highly acclaimed Gut Instinct exhibition in The Glucksman in 2017 along with APC.  He has given many high profile talks to global audiences at TEDMED, Wired Health and The World Government Summit. He was named 2017 UCC Science Communicator of the Year is frequently featured in international news media (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Sunday Times, Fox News, Nature and Der Spiegel). 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 been translated into Chinese, Spanish and Polish.
APC would like to express a sincere and heart-felt thank you to Anita Maguire for her vigorous and dedicated support of research in UCC for the last 10 years. These were seminal years in the APC, and Anita’s support through the VP for Research and Innovation office, as well as her role on our Governance Committee were instrumental in APC’s research success.
