Research Staff Profiles
Professor John V. Reynolds, Head of Department
Professor John V. Reynolds
Professor John V. Reynolds (PDF CV 100 kB) is Professor of Surgery and Head of Department at Trinity College Dublin. He took up this position in July 2001. He is a specialist oesophageal and gastric surgeon and is based at St. James’s Hospital. He is the regional director of cancer services in the south-west area of the Eastern Regional Health Authority. His clinical and research training involved periods at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, and St. Mary’s Hospital, London. He was consultant oesophageal surgeon and senior lecturer in St. James’s University Hospital in Leeds before returning to Dublin in 1997. His research interests are in molecular understanding of Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer, the molecular prediction of response or resistance to chemotherapy and radiation therapy, obesity, inflammation and cancer, and the modulation of the immune response following complex major surgery. Professor Reynolds has published over 140 articles in high impact peer-reviewed journals.
Dr Graham Pigeon, Senior Lecturer
Dr. Graham Pidgeon
Dr. Graham Pidgeon graduated from DCU with a degree in Analytical Science and obtained a Ph.D. in Cancer Research from the Dept. Surgery, RCSI/DCU in 2000. Awarded an American Cancer Foundation Fellowship, he worked as research fellow at Wayne State University, Michigan with Prof. Kenneth Honn on the regulation of prostate cancer survival by bioactive lipids. In 2002 he returned to Ireland as a senior postdoctoral fellow in the Dept. Clinical Pharmacology at RCSI. He was awarded a HRB postdoctoral fellowship in 2004, and joined Prof. Dermot Kelleher and Dr. Ken O’Byrne in the Thoracic Oncology Research Group at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at TCD/St. James as research lecturer. He developed his own research group focused on the regulation of VEGF-mediated survival pathways by COX and LOX in lung cancer and combining inhibitors of these pathways with conventional chemotherapy.
He was appointed senior lecturer in Dept. Surgery at TCD/St. James's Hospital in 2007 and has expanded these research areas into other prevalent solid malignancies, including oesophageal, colorectal and breast cancer. He has published in a number of high impact journals including Cancer Research and Circulation, and was awarded the IJS doctor award 2005 for Cardiology. His current research unit are investigating the molecular and immunological mechanisms linking obesity and visceral adipose tissue with the development progression of oesophageal and colorectal cancer. Recent scientific literature highlights the importance of central obesity and metabolic syndrome as negatively impacting on cancer risk, tumour size, metastatic potential, and both disease free and overall survival. The group are prospectively investigating the incidence of central adiposity, metabolic syndrome and adipocyte secretion amongst newly diagnosed patients with these cancers to determine the link between these parameters and tumour size, metastases, response to conventional treatments and survival.
Other aspects of his research includes the role of downstream mediators of cyclooxygenase signalling in thrombosis and angiogenesis in cancer, and the effect of cyclooxygenase and lipoxygenase in the growth and metastasis of lung and oesophageal cancer. He lectures on the undergraduate and postgraduate Molecular Medicine modules within the School of Medicine and is currently developing a new MSc in Molecular Oncology.
Dr Jacintha O'Sullivan, Senior Lecturer
Dr. Jacintha O’Sullivan
Dr. Jacintha O’Sullivan was appointed as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Surgery, St. James's Hospital / TCD in 2010. Jacintha graduated from University College Dublin in 1995 with a first class honours degree in Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics. She then carried out her Ph.D. training at the Adrinodack Biomedical Research Institute, Lake Placid, New York and at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana in cancer cell biology. In 2000, she moved to the University of Washington, Seattle as a NIH funded fellow where she investigated how genomic instability events are crucial in driving disease progression in inflammatory diseases. In 2003, Jacintha returned to Dublin to the Centre for Colorectal Disease, St. Vincent’s University Hospital as a senior scientist to work with a multidisciplinary colorectal cancer team and to establish a translational colorectal cancer research program. Currently she directs two upper GI research programs in Barrett’s Oesophagus and Colorectal Cancer in the Department of Surgery, St. James's Hospital / TCD in collaboration with her surgical and clinical colleagues.
Dr. O’Sullivan has established a strong scientific track record in the field of gastrointestinal cancers and inflammatory conditions with publications in high impact journals such as Nature Genetics, Human Molecular Genetics and Journal of Clinical Oncology. She has received grant funding from the Health Research Board, Irish Cancer Society and Science Foundation Ireland and from different industry sponsors. She has acted as a council member of the Irish Association for Cancer Research (IACR) from 2008-2012 and has been elected as honorary secretary for 2012-2015. She has supervised many MD, master and Ph.D. thesis to completion. The current research themes of the group focus on 1) cellular instability and GI disease progression 2) drug screening to search for new therapeutics and 3) the role of the tumour microenvironment in modulating disease progression and treatment sensitivity in GI cancers.
Contact information:
Tel: 01 896 2149
e-mail: osullij4@tcd.ie
Dr. Joanne Lysaght, HRB Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Joanne Lysaght
Dr. Joanne Lysaght graduated from N.U.I Maynooth with a first class Honours Degree in Science in 2001. She then went on to complete a PhD in 2005, in the Department of Biochemistry and Immunology in Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Prof. Kingston Mills. The main focus of her Ph.D was the modulation of innate and adaptive anti-tumour immunity using microbial derived molecules. In addition, the impact of physiological location of the tumour on anti-tumour immunity was also a focus of her studies. Following completion of her Ph.D, she began work as a clinical scientist in the Cancer Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory based in St. James’s Hospital, the only clinical lab of its kind in Ireland that utilises molecular techniques for the diagnosis of haematological malignancies. She then took up a post-doctoral position in the Department of Haematology and Oncology, TCD, where she worked on a novel family of chemotherapeutic drugs for the treatment of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
In 2008, she began working with Prof. John Reynolds in the Department of Surgery, TCD/St. James's Hospital as a CROSS funded post-doctoral fellow. Her current research focuses on the impact of obesity on anti-tumour immune responses in oesophageal and colorectal cancer patients. In particular, the direct influence of adipose tissue on both innate and adaptive immune cells is a major focus of her work. In 2009, Dr. Lysaght was awarded a HRB Post-Doctoral fellowship to continue her work in the area of obesity and tumour immunity. Dr. Lysaght has authored a number of high impact, internationally peer-reviewed manuscripts in the area of tumour immunity and obesity and is a guest lecturer in Trinity College and St. Luke's Hospital where she lectures in the areas of tumour immunology, inflammation, immunotherapy and obesity.
Dr. Stephen Maher, Postdoctoral Scientis
Dr. Stephen Maher
Dr. Stephen Maher graduated from the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, in 2000 with an honours degree in Bioanalytical Science. Following this he completed a Ph.D. in Immunology with the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, at the Department of Surgery, Beaumont Hospital, Dublin. Under the supervision of Prof. David Bouchier-Hayes and Dr. Deirdre Toomey, Dr. Maher’s interest lay in the augmentation of IL-2 immunotherapy, used in the treatment of malignant melanoma and renal cell carcinoma, with the non-toxic amino acid taurine. In these postgraduate studies he found that taurine could attenuate IL-2-induced T cell (a specialised immune cell) death, which is a deleterious side-effect associated with this form of immunotherapy.
Upon receipt of his doctoral degree in 2004, Dr. Maher worked as a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, in the US. In the laboratory of Experimental Immunology, headed by Dr. Giorgio Trinchieri, and under the direction of Drs. Ana Gamero and Howard Young, he studied the intracellular signalling cascades activated by the newly discovered cytokine interferon-lambda. He also examined the anti-tumour activity of this anti-viral, anti-proliferative molecule. He has authored review papers, book chapters and original papers in a number of international peer-reviewed journals, such as Clinical and Experimental Immunology, Molecular Biology of the Cell, and Immunology and Cell Biology.
Dr. Maher returned to Ireland in May 2007 and joined the Department of Surgery as a postdoctoral researcher. His current research asks whether differences in serum protein profiles can predict response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy in patients with oesophageal and colorectal carcinoma. Furthermore, he is also studying molecular genetic alterations in oesophageal cancer cells, with an aim to understanding how these cells become (or are inherently) resistant to radiotherapy.