Rate My Professor Cristín Ryan

Professor Cristín Ryan serves as Professor in Practice of Pharmacy in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Trinity College Dublin. Her primary research specializations encompass pharmacy practice, with a focus on optimising prescribing and medicines management, particularly in older adults. Key areas include appropriate polypharmacy, potentially inappropriate prescribing using tools such as STOPP/START and PROMPT criteria, medication adherence interventions, behaviour change strategies, pharmacogenetics, and antimicrobial stewardship. She has led and contributed to studies evaluating prescribing patterns, developing interventions for primary care, and assessing environmental impacts of medications, such as carbon emissions from inhaled respiratory medicines.

Ryan's academic career includes prior roles as Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Practice at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland before her appointment at Trinity College Dublin, where she holds qualifications of MPharm and PhD. She is Programme Director for pharmacy education programmes and a member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland since 2005, as well as the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium. Her extensive publication record features peer-reviewed articles in journals including Age and Ageing, BMC Health Services Research, European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, and Drugs and Aging. Notable works include 'STOPP (Screening Tool of Older Person's Prescriptions) and START (Screening Tool to Alert doctors to Right Treatment). Consensus validation' (International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 2008), 'The development of the PROMPT (PRescribing Optimally in Middle-aged People's Treatments) criteria' (BMC Health Services Research, 2014), 'Potentially inappropriate prescribing in two populations with differing socio-economic profiles: a cross-sectional database study using the PROMPT criteria' (European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 2016), 'Theory-Based Interventions to Improve Medication Adherence in Older Adults Prescribed Polypharmacy: A Systematic Review' (Drugs and Aging, 2017), and 'Development of an intervention to improve appropriate polypharmacy in older people in primary care using a theory-based method' (BMC Health Services Research, 2016). Ryan has secured research funding through the Dean's Research Initiatives Fund in the Faculty of Health Sciences and was among eleven Trinity researchers receiving €4 million in SFI Frontiers for the Future funding in 2022 to address global health challenges. Her contributions enhance prescribing safety, patient outcomes, and pharmacy education.