Jochen Prehn has been Professor and Chairman of the Department of Physiology and Medical Physics at the RCSI since 2003, and was appointed Director of the Centre for Systems Medicine in 2006 (http://www.systemsmedicineireland.ie/). He was the first recipient of a Science Foundation Ireland Research Professorship award.

Professor Prehn leads a research group focusing on the role of mitochondria and apoptotic signalling molecules in the regulation of cell death mechanisms, and their implication for human disease. His group focuses on the Bcl-2 family of proteins, which contain both pro- and anti-apoptotic proteins and regulate the mitochondrial pathway of apoptosis. The group currently is one of the only groups world-wide that has successfully begun to translate dynamic systems models of apoptosis signaling into a clinical context, and has filed several patent applications for the use of these technologies as prognostic markers and stratification tools. A second major research interest lies in real-time imaging of cell death signals in neurons and cancer cells, employing confocal GFP and FRET techniques.