Professor, Universite de Sherbrooke
Stephen Cunnane obtained a PhD in Physiology at McGill University in 1980, followed by post-doctoral research on nutrition and brain development in Aberdeen, London, and Nova Scotia. He was a faculty member in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Toronto, from 1986 – 2003, where his research was in two overlapping areas – (i) the role of omega-3 fatty acids in brain development and human health, and (ii) the relation between ketones, the very high fat ketogenic diet and brain development.
In 2003, Dr. Cunnane was awarded a senior Canada Research Chair at the Research Center on Aging and became a full professor in the departments of Medicine and Physiology & Biophysics at the Université de Sherbrooke. The main themes of his current research are to use brain imaging techniques to study changing brain fuel metabolism and cognitive function during aging, and to understand how and why omega-3 fatty acid homeostasis changes during aging. He has published over 280 peer-reviewed research papers and was elected to the French National Academy of Medicine in 2009.
Dr. Cunnane has published five books including two on flaxseed in human health and two on nutritional and metabolic constraints on human brain evolution – Survival of the Fattest: The Key to Human Brain Evolution (World Scientific 2005), and Human Brain Evolution: Influence of Fresh and Coastal Food Resources (Wiley, 2010).