Prof Jonathan O’B Hourihane

Jonathan Hourihane is Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health in Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and Children’s Health Ireland Temple St, Dublin, Ireland since 2019, having been Chair and Head of Department in UCC, Cork, Ireland 2005-2019.

His primary area of clinical and research interest is in paediatric food allergy and anaphylaxis. He is a global opinion leader in paediatric food allergy and is Ireland’s most cited Paediatrician, with over 250 peer-reviewed publications.

He was a Fulbright-HRB Health Impact Scholar to Children’s Hospital Colorado, USA in 2020. He is a founding Board member and is current President of the Clemens von Pirquet Foundation, and of the Irish Food Allergy Network (www.ifan.ie). He was President of the Irish Association of Allergy and Immunology 2017-2022. He is PI of the INFANT Centre in UCC.

He has been involved in longitudinal observational and intervention studies for more than 20 years, relating to both investigator-led and industry-sponsored allergy prevention trials in infants and more recently in the emerging field of immunotherapy for food allergy.

He led the globally unique CORAL study about the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on children’s health including allergy and neurodevelopmental outcoems and their gut health ,especially their microbiome. In 2025 he will be launching a follow up study called FLORAL- funded by Science Foundation Ireland - aiming to study, in a similar way to CORAL, 1000 new babies born 2 years after the pandemic was declared over.