ProfDarran O'Connor

Prof O’Connor is Head of the School of Postgraduate Studies and a molecular oncologist who obtained his PhD from Trinity College Dublin/RCSI in 2000. Subsequently, he conducted his postdoctoral training in cancer biology at Columbia University, New York and the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Prof Nick La Thangue, FRSE. He also spent addition time as a Visiting Fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School and the Netherlands Cancer Institute where he joined the group of Prof Rene Bernards. Darran returned to Ireland in 2004 as a HRB Career Development Fellow. In 2009 he was employed as a Research Fellow in Cancer Biology at UCD within the School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science and appointed as Senior Lecturer in Cancer Biology within SBBS in 2013. He moved his research group to RCSI in August 2015. Darran's team (funded by SFI, The European Commission, The Susan G Komen Foundation, The Irish Cancer Society and The Irish Research Council) has extensive experience in the discovery of molecular determinants of cancer progression (via transcriptomic/functional genomic profiling), functional analysis using in vitro and xenograft models, and their clinical translation utilizing tissue microarrays. He was elected to the council of the Irish Association for Cancer Research in 2011 and awarded the 9th St Luke's Young Investigator award in 2012. Other prestigious awards include fellowships from the European Molecular Biology Organisation and the Human Frontiers Science Programme. Publications: 60 peer reviewed papers to date, including in Nature Cell Biology, Nature Reviews Cancer, Nature Communications, Journal of Clinical Oncology, JNCI, Clinical Cancer Research & Cancer Research among others