Professor Stephen Cunnane

Professor 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.

From 1986–2003 he was a faculty member in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Toronto, where his research was in two overlapping areas – the role of omega-3 fatty acids in brain development and human health, and the relation between ketones, the very high fat ketogenic diet and brain development.

In 2003, Stephen was awarded a senior Canada Research Chair at the Research Center on Ageing, and became a full professor in the departments of Medicine and Physiology and Biophysics at the Université de Sherbrooke. He has published over 280 peer-reviewed research papers.

Stephen has also 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).