John F. Cryan is Professor & Chair, Dept. of Anatomy & Neuroscience, University College Cork 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 the National University of Ireland, 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 Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel Switzerland prior to joining UCC in 2005.