Obesity, Dietary Fats, and Gastrointestinal Cancer Risk-Potential Mechanisms Relating to Lipid Metabolism and Inflammation

Jacintha O’Sullivan is a Professor in Translational Oncology, based at the Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI), Trinity College Dublin, St. James’s Hospital. She is the Director of the MSc in Translational Oncology, the Education lead for the Trinity St. James’s Cancer Institute, and the Education and Outreach Coordinator at TTMI. She 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 Adirondack Biomedical Research Institute, Lake Placid, New York and at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana in the field of cancer cell biology. In 2000, she moved to the University of Washington, Seattle as an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow. In 2003, she returned to Dublin to the Centre for Colorectal Disease, St. Vincent’s University Hospital/UCD as a Senior Scientist to establish and direct a translational gastrointestinal research program. She was appointed as Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery, Trinity College Dublin/St. James’s Hospital in 2010 and was promoted to Professor in 2016. She has 106 publications with 4503 citations and an h-index of 39 (Scopus, 30 November 2023).

Helen M. Roche’s academic background is in Human Nutrition and Molecular Medicine. Her appointment as Full Professor of Nutrigenomics bridges disciplines based at the UCD Conway Institute and the UCD Institute of Food & Health within UCD. She is also a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Principal Investigator and a Food for Health Ireland (FHI) Principal Investigator. In 2014, she won significant funding from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. In her career as a Wellcome Trust Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Molecular Nutrition at TCD, she established the first Nutrigenomics research group in Ireland at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at TCD. She was recently appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the European Healthy Life Healthy Diet (HDHL) Joint Programming Initiative (JPI). She has since been elected Chair-Elect of the HDHL JPI SAB in 2014. She has held a range of research roles at UCD, including VP of Research, Innovation and Impact for the College of Health and Agricultural Sciences. In 2021 she was appointed Director of the UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research. She is a Fellow of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences. She also served as a Board member for the RCSI Hospital Group. She has 263 publications with 12691 citations and an h-index of 64 (Scopus, 1 December 2023).