Theme Lead

Position: Chair of Pathology and TSJCI Cancer Prevention Team Leader

Team/Members of the group

• Dr Cara Martin, Assistant Professor 
• Dr Sharon O’Toole, Senior Research Fellow
• Dr Mark Ward, Senior Research Fellow
• Dr Bashir Mohammed, Senior Research Fellow
• Dr Prerna Tewari, Senior Research Fellow
• Dr Tanya Kelly, Post doctoral research fellow
• Dr Ola Ibrahim, Post doctoral Research Fellow
• Dr David Joyce, Post doctoral Research Fellow
• Dr Mark Bates, Post doctoral Research Fellow
• Dr Helen Keegan, Post doctoral Fellow [NCSL]^
• Dr Christine White, Post doctoral Fellow [NCSL]^
• Dr Stephen Reynolds, Post doctoral Fellow [NCSL]^
• Ms Padma Naik, PhD candidate
• Ms Laura Edgerton, PhD candidate 
• Dr Colm Kerr, PhD candidate [co-supervision]
• Jessica Heatlie, PhD candidate [co-supervision]*
• Thuy Giang, PhD candidate [co-supervision]*
• Ka Lok Li, PhD candidate [co-supervision]*
• Francesca Chilcott, PhD candidate [co-supervision]*
• Dr Roisin O’Connor, MD candidate
• Dr Victoria Malone
• Dr Anna Keogh  
• Dr Marguerite Carter
• Dr Eoghan O’Connor
• Prof Doug Brooks [visiting scientist]
• Prof Stavros Selemidis [visiting scientist]
• Dr Robert Brooks [visiting scientist]

^National Cervical Screening Laboratory (NCSL) 
*co-supervision with Prof Doug Brooks, UniSA 

Close collaborators:
Harvard Medical School, Stanford University, A-Star Singapore, University of Singapore, University of South Australia [UniSA] and RMIT, Australia. 

Main Funders:
EU, Enterprise Ireland, SFI, Health Research Board, Industry Partners  

Active research programmes: 
Professor O Leary leads a large investigator group at TCD, which has established an international reputation in the area of virally driven cancers, particularly cervical, ovarian, prostate, head and neck cancer, cancer metastasis and immune response to cancer. He has worked at centres of international excellence including: The University of Oxford, Cornell University, The German Cancer Institute, Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin, Klinikum Steglitz. He has established research collaborations with Harvard Medical School, Stanford University, A-Star Singapore, University of Singapore, University of South Australia [UniSA] and RMIT Australia. He is the Chair of Pathology at TCD, Ireland and Consultant Pathologist at St. James’s Hospital [Ireland’s largest hospital] and Director of Pathology at The Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital. Over the past 29 years as a trainee in Pathology, to becoming an Academic Consultant in Pathology, John has strived to gain a better understanding of disease processes and how they affect patients. Much of his work has focused on developing ‘Precision Medicine’ to aid in disease stratification, to better understand the molecular pathways in disease, to develop a new tool-box of technologies that will help aid disease discovery and increase our understanding of disease while in tandem examining the impact of disease on patients. His research is considered disruptive and transformative by my peers, spanning important areas in human disease and offering new insights into disease processes. 

He has over 670 publications with greater than 270 original peer reviewed publications and has published 3 books. His career h-index is 60, i-10 index 203 and has over 15,000 citations in the published literature. He has published in high impact journals (Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology, Nature Communications, The Lancet, PNAS, JNCI, Nature Protocols). 

Over the past 10 years, his patented discoveries have led to the development of: a novel test for pre-term labour in pregnancy; a new diagnostic marker [p16/ki-67] in cervical pre-cancer and cancer; the introduction of artificial intelligence [AI] digital cytology in cervical screening; novel diagnostic and prognostic markers in ovarian cancer; novel endosomal diagnostic and prognostic markers in prostate cancer; development of molecular, immunological and therapeutic maps of SARS-CoV-2 biology.