Nutritional psychiatry - where are we going?

John F. Cryan (Chair of the Scientific Programme Committee 35th, 36th and 37th ECNP congress) is Professor & Chair, Dept. of Anatomy & Neuroscience, University College Cork. He is also a Principal Investigator in the APC Microbiome Institute. 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, 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. Prof. Cryan's current research is focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut & microbiome and how it applies to stress, psychiatric and immune-related disorders at key time-windows across the lifespan. Prof. Cryan has published over 650 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has a H-index of 150 (Google Scholar). He is a Senior Editor of Neuropharmacology and of Nutritional Neuroscience. He is on the editorial board of a further 15 journals. He has edited three books and is co-author of the bestselling “The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection” (National Geographic Press, 2017). He has received numerous awards including UCC Researcher of the Year in 2012, the University of Utrecht Award for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research in 2013, UCC Research Communicator of the Year 2017, and being named on the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher list in 2014 and Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher list in 2017, 2018 & 2019. He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2017. He also received a Research Mentor Award from the American Gastroenterology Association and the Tom Connor Distinguished Scientist Award from Neuroscience Ireland in 2017 and was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium in 2018. He was a TEDMED speaker in Washington in 2014 and is Past-President of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society. Prof. Cryan's current research interests include the neurobiological basis of stress-related neuropsychiatric 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. He is also interested in applying novel approaches to facilitate drug/siRNA delivery to the brain in vivo.

Felice Jacka OAM is Professor of Nutritional Psychiatry and Director of the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University. She is founder and immediate past president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research (ISNPR) and immediate past president of the Australian Alliance for the Prevention of Mental Disorders (APMD). Professor Jacka has pioneered and led a highly innovative program of research that examines how individuals’ diets interact with the risk for mental health problems. Her current work focuses closely on the links between diet, gut health and mental and brain health. This research is being carried out with the ultimate goal of developing new, evidence-based prevention and treatment strategies for mental disorders. Professor Jacka is a Clarivate Highly-Cited Researcher (2020-23), putting her in the top 0.1% of publishing scientists worldwide. She has recently published a book for the general public called ‘Brain Changer’ through Pan Macmillan Australia and Yellow Kite in the UK and EU. Her children’s book – There’s a Zoo in my Poo – was published in July 2020. In 2021 she was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the Queen’s Honours for her contribution to Nutritional Psychiatry research.