The School of Medicine is delighted to announce the appointment of Owen Smith to the position of Professor of Child, Adolescent & Young Adult (CAYA) Oncology (2022).
Professor Smith (pictured) entered Trinity College in 1976 to read Natural Sciences and graduated with a moderatorship in Biochemistry in 1980. He went on to graduate in Medicine from Trinity in 1985 and after nine years postgraduate training at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine and Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, University College London he was appointed Consultant Haematologist at the National Children’s and St James’s Hospitals, Dublin. Between 1995 and 1999, Professor Smith was successively lecturer in Haematology, senior lecturer in Haematology, before being appointed Professor of Haematology at Trinity College Dublin in 2002.
Since 2002, Professor Smith has worked as a Consultant Paediatric Haematologist at Our Lady's Children’s Hospital, Crumlin. He is the Academic lead of Children's Health Ireland, the Clinical Lead for Children, Adolescent and Young Adult Cancers, and the Chair or the SIOPE AYA Committee.
He has devoted the last 30 years of his career caring for neonates, children and adolescents with cancer and blood disorders in terms of basic science, clinical research, and patient care.
Professor Smith’s main area of research (clinical) has focused on evidence-based child and adolescent randomised peer-reviewed haemato-oncology clinical trials. Within the Medical Research Council Childhood Leukaemia Working Party back in the early 1990s, he focussed on some of the most important pressing issues of the day in relation to evidence-based randomised peer-reviewed child and adolescent leukaemia clinical trials.
To date, Professor Smith has made significant contributions to these clinical trial portfolios that have become internationally recognised to be unimpeachably thorough, non-political, unbiased, and properly designed that have resulted in excellent outcomes. He is the longest serving (30 years) representative from Ireland on the UK National Clinical Research Institute, Children’s Cancer & Leukaemia Clinical Studies Group. He is also one of the longest serving members of the UK leukaemia clinical trials programme and perhaps more importantly he has entered more children and young adolescents into UK based childhood leukaemia trials than any of its current members – Dublin has been the second biggest contributor after Birmingham during this period.
His other internationally recognised area of research (basic / translational) has been the elucidation of the relationship between the protein C (PC) activation pathway and the systemic inflammatory response sepsis syndromes.
He has co-authored more than 400 research original articles, letters, books, book chapters, abstracts, and papers. Professor Smith is a Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, Royal College of Pathologists, Royal College of Physicians of Dublin, Royal College of Physicians London, Royal College of Physicians Glasgow, and Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh.
He was admitted to Honorary Fellowship of Trinity College Dublin in 2009 and was awarded Honorary Professorship title of Regius Professor of Physic (1637) in the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin in 2014. In 2015 Professor Smith was appointed Professor of Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine in the School of Medicine at University College Dublin. In the same year he was conferred honorary Commander in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his life-long work on cancer in children and adolescents by Queen Elizabeth, on the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Owen Smith Professor of Child, Adolescent & Young Adult (CAYA) Oncology (2022)