Professor John F. Cryan is Professor & Chair at the Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience in the School of Medicine, and was appointed Vice President for Research & Innovation in March 2021. He is also a Principal Investigator in the APC Microbiome Institute. He received a B.Sc. (Hons) in Biochemistry and PhD in Pharmacology from University of Galway, Ireland and was a visiting fellow at the Dept Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Australia, 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 as a Group Leader in the pharmaceutical industry at the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research in Basel Switzerland, prior to joining UCC in 2005.

Professor Cryan's current research is focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut and microbiome and how it applies to stress, psychiatric and immune-related disorders at key time-windows across the lifespan. 

He is a Senior Editor of Neurobiology of Stress. He is on the editorial board of a further 15 journals. He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2017 and has served on UCC’s Governing Body from 2015-2021. He was elected a Fellow of the European Academy of Microbiologists in 2026.

• Microbiome, brain and behaviour across the lifespan
• Neurobiology of stress-related disorders including depression, anxiety, drug addiction, cognitive dysfunction and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
• Immune - Brain interactions
• Behavioural Pharmacology