The Department of Veterinary Sciences of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical, Biomedical and Veterinary Sciences has chosen to honour Professor John F. Cryan in 2018 for his groundbreaking and profound contributions to fundamental and applied research in the current understanding of the mechanisms how microbes could influence the brain, including its development and function. Promotor is Jean-Pierre Timmermans from the Laboratory of Cell Biology and Histology.

Cryan's current research is focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut & microbiome and how it applies to stress and immune-related disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome and obesity, and neurodevelopmental or neurological disorders such as autism, depression and drug dependence. This rapidly evolving and truly multidisciplinary research field has implications across many aspects of medicine, including psychiatry, gastroenterology, obstetrics, gynecology and pediatrics.

About John Cryan
John F. Cryan received a PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He was a visiting fellow at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, Australia, which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He spent four years at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel Switzerland, as a LabHead Behavioural Pharmacology prior to joining University College Cork in 2005. He is Professor & Chair of the Department of Anatomy & Neuroscience, University College Cork and serves on the University’s Governing Body. 

He is also a Principal Investigator in the APC Microbiome Institute. He submitted more than 340 peer reviewed scientific papers and has a H-index of 76. He is senior editor of Neuropharmacology and Nutritional Neuroscience and author of three books including Microbial Endocrinology: The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis in Health and Disease (Springer Press, 2014). He was recipient of numerous awards and was a TEDMED speaker in Washington in 2014. In 2017 he became Elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy.