Felipe Cunha (PhD Candidate)

For his PhD at the University of Lethbridge, Felipe Cunha studies the brains of birds. He looks at differences between species - the effects of brain size, differences in neurons, and how these may affect behaviour.

The image on the right are sections of the cerebellum (a brain structure responsible mainly in motor coordination) of different birds - you can see, under the same scale-bar, how size and shape vary greatly across species. One of the questions, for example, I want to answer is: do differences in size and shape of the cerebellum reflect changes in number and size of neurons?

What is your research about?

I study how brains change across different species and how differences in brain size and number/size of neurons might explain behavior. For example, do bigger brains have necessarily more neurons? How does the size of neurons change with brain size? Also, does a bigger brain have a greater processing capacity?

What made you go into industry or academia? How did you get involved with your current research?

I got really interested in evolutionary biology back in Brazil, when I was starting my BSc in Biology. Then, as an independent student, I worked in a lab that investigates the evolution of the brain across different species of mammals - and I got fascinated with this topic of research. Since then, I have been working in this field, now at UofL. During my master’s, in Brazil, I used to read many papers from a lab here at UofL, and decided to apply to develop a PhD project with them. Here I am!

What excites you about your work?

What is nice about grad school is that you can pretty much build your career according to your main interests. That is, you basically study what you are passionate by. In my case, I’m really interested on the topics I have been studying. Besides that, science gives you the opportunity to meet other folks that are also interested in the same research topics, so it’s great to discuss ideas and results with people from different backgrounds (not to say all the opportunities for travelling and visiting new places during conferences and workshops as well).

What are the impacts of your work?

I think comparative, evolutionary biology is a critical field in science if we want to better understand how organisms function. Depending on what someone wants to study, for example, the best model species is not always rats or mice; sometimes what is considered an “atypical” species, it is actually a great model to study something. My work thus aims to understand how brains from so many different species are constructed, how they vary in neuron numbers, and so on; and I think this importantly broadens our understanding in neuroscience.

What is a fun fact about yourself?

I can dance some different Brazilian typical dances, and since I moved to Canada I have performed in some events at the University.