Motoring on: UCC gut-health expert looks forward to new challenges

As he prepares to leave UCC, Prof Ted Dinan recalls the early-morning moment he coined the word psychobiotics, a term describing how bacteria in the stomach can influence our mood, writes Helen O’Callaghan

TED Dinan was due to give an 8am lecture at a symposium in Dublin. It was a Sunday in 2012 and he wished he could be anywhere else. But in those moments of musing on what else he could have been doing, a word flashed into his mind. The word was ‘psychobiotic’ — Dinan had just coined a term to describe mood-improving microbes or bacteria.