Stress, Immunity and the Microbiota-Gut Brain Axis in Early-Life: Priming for Health and Disease

Prof. John F. Cryan

University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

John F. Cryan is Professor & Chair, Dept. of Anatomy & Neuroscience, University College Cork.  He received a B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He was a visiting fellow at the Dept Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Australia (1997-1998), which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships  at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA and The Scripps Research Institute, 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 UCC in 2005 where he was  a Senior Lecturer in Pharmacology in the School of Pharmacy and in the Dept. Pharmacology & Therapeutics UCC. Currently he is also a Principal Investigator in the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (http://www.ucc.ie/research/apc/content). Prof. Cryan's current research interests include the neurobiological basis of stress-related disorders including depression, anxiety and drug dependence. Moreover, his group is also 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 disorders such as autism.

Prof. Cryan has an H-Index of 52 (Google Scholar) having published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters including articles in high-impact journals such as PNAS, Neuron, Nature Reviews Neurosci. Molecular Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, Progress in Neurobiology, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Gastroenterology, Gut and Journal of Neuroscience. He  has edited books  on "Behavioural Neurogenetics" (Springer Press, 2012) on"Depression: From Psychopathology to Pharmacotherapy" (Karger Press, 2010) and the forthcoming “Microbial Endocrinology: The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis in Health and Disease” (Springer Press, 2014).

Prof. Cryan is a Senior Editor of Neuropharmacology and Nutritional Neuroscience and an Editor of British Journal of Pharmacology. He is Advisory Editor of Psychopharmacology; on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Brain Research; an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience; an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychopharmacology and Frontiers in Gastrointestinal Pharmacology; an Editorial Board Member of Neurogastroenterology & Motility, Behavioural Pharmacology; Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Genes, Brain & Behavior and International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology. He is an adhoc reviewer for >75  different journals including Science, PNAS, J.Neurosci, Mol. Psychiatry, Arch Gen Psych, TiPS, Gastroenterology, Nature Methods and  PLOS Biology. Prof Cryan received the inaugural University College Cork Researcher of the Year Award in 2012. Cryan has also been honoured with the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Fellowship Award, the Wyeth Psychopharmacology Award from British Association of Psychopharmacology and the Young Scientist Award from the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society. He has received commercialisation awards from UCC in 2012 and 2013. Further, in 2013 he received the University of Utrecht Award for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research and delivered the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland Conway Review Lecture and the De Pazzi Lecture at University College Cork. He gave the Wingate Lecture at Barts & The London School of Medicine and Dentistry in 2014.