Trinity Professor Tomás Ryan to lead €10.5 million international study of brain and immunity
Team to explore how the brain remembers infection.
Professor Tomás Ryan from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) has secured a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Synergy award.
Prof. Ryan will coordinate an international team investigating how the brain remembers infection and inflammation, and how these memories may shape future health.
Commencing in 2027, the six-year Immune Memory project brings together four researchers and their teams in Ireland, Germany and the United States. The project is one of just 48 projects selected from 957 proposals that will share funding of €500 million.
Dr Diarmuid O’Brien, CEO of Research Ireland, has welcomed Prof. Ryan’s award success, saying:
Tomás’ success shows how national investment can open doors to international research leadership. We are proud that previously allocated Research Ireland funding [Frontiers for the Future programme] has helped him to develop his work on early-life memory. This Synergy award gives Tomás and his team the scope to pursue an ambitious idea with the potential to deepen our understanding of lifelong health.
Based in Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Professor Ryan will coordinate teams at Duke University in the United States and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the University of Bremen in Germany.
The team will examine how immune experiences leave physical memory traces, known as engrams, in the brain during early development, and how these influence later immune responses. It will also explore how chronic inflammation before birth affects these memories, seeking insights into brain development, disease susceptibility and lifelong health.
Explaining the research, Professor Ryan said:
We often think of the brain and the immune system as two separate systems but, in reality, they are in constant communication. What we are interested in understanding is how the brain remembers past immune experiences, stores these experiences as ‘engrams’, and how those memories might influence the body’s ability to respond to future situations.
This is Professor Ryan’s second ERC award, following an ERC Starting Grant in 2016. A Research Ireland Frontiers for the Future awardee, he previously received an SFI President of Ireland Future Research Leaders Award. In 2020, he became the first scientist based at an Irish institution to receive the Lister Institute Research Prize. A Trinity genetics graduate, he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, followed by postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studies how memories are stored, retrieved and forgotten, and how these processes change during development.
ERC funding secured by Ireland-based researchers under Horizon Europe (2021-2027) will reach €230 million once all grant agreements are finalised, with a full year of the work programme remaining and some 2026 competition results still to come.
Funded through the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, ERC Synergy Grants support research beyond the reach of any individual investigator, bringing together two to four principal investigators with the complementary expertise to break new scientific ground.
Image caption: Team members (left-right): Tomás Ryan (TCD, Ireland), Staci Bilbo (Duke University, USA), Claudia Buss (Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin Germany), and Markus-Werkle Bergner (Max Planck Institute for Human Development and University of Bremen, Germany).
