Tomás Ryan

Trinity College Dublin

Tomás Ryan is an Associate Professor at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology and Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin.

The Ryan Lab engages in inter-disciplinary research projects to understand how memory engrams are formed during learning, how they can be altered or be forgotten with experience, how they change over development, and how they interact with innate representations. The motivation of the group is to understand how long-term ‘representations’ can be stored in the brain as stable yet mutable neuronal substrates, whether innate or learned.

Tomás Ryan originally graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 2005 with a BA in Genetics. He then completed his PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2010. Following a year as Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University Cambridge, he relocated to the USA to work as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the group of Susumu Tonegawa (Nobel Laureate, 1987) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT he was centrally involved in the development and application of novel methods that allow for the labelling and manipulation of specific memory engrams in the rodent brain. In 2017, he returned to Ireland and started his research group at Trinity College Dublin. Tomás also holds a joint faculty position at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Australia.

The Ryan Lab’s research is supported by the European Research Council (ERC), Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and the Jacobs Foundation. In 2018 he was elected to the European FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, for which he acted as Chair from 2019 to 2021. In 2020, he became the first scientist working in Ireland to be awarded the Lister Institute Research Prize by the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine.

Email: tomas.ryan@tcd.ie
Ryan Lab