Dr. Darran O’Connor

RCSI

Dr. Darran O’Connor

Dr. O’Connor obtained his PhD from Trinity College Dublin in 2000, and conducted his postdoctoral training in cancer biology at Columbia University, New York and at the University of Glasgow. He subsequently returned to Ireland as a HRB Career Development Fellow and, in 2009, was employed as Senior Research Fellow & Lecturer in Cancer Biology in UCD.

In 2015, he was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology, where he now leads a research group in the Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics department. He is largely funded by the Irish Cancer Society and Science Foundation Ireland. He has received a number of prestigious fellowships based on his work, notably from the European Molecular Biology Organisation and the Human Frontiers Science Programme and has spent additional time as a visiting fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Netherlands Cancer Institute where he joined the group of Prof Rene Bernards. A major of focus of Dr. O’Connor’s research work is the identification, validation and mechanistic anchoring of novel cancer biomarkers, with particular emphasis on translation of transcriptomic, genomic and proteomic datasets into clinically relevant assays. He also has an interest in response and resistance to endocrine therapies in breast cancer. Based on this work, he was awarded an EACR Young Scientist award in 2009, won the 9th St Luke’s Young Investigator award in 2012 and has published his work in Nature Cell Biology, Nature Reviews Cancer, Oncogene, EMBO Reports and Clinical Cancer Research among others.