Luís Filipe Das Neves Cunha

Luis Cunha interest in biological sciences led him to pursue a degree in Biology in one of his favourite places on earth, the Azores Islands, Portugal. During his bachelor studies he also had the opportunity to conduct research in the Mexican Caribbean region, where he participated in a short-term research programme about invertebrate larval nutritional and general physiology aspects. This research focused on ornamental caridean larvae, mainly in an attempt of obtaining basic biological information for productive purposes, but also to describe the larval development, which was not well known. The success of this research project reinforced his conviction to pursue a career in research and in-part allowed him to attain a First Class Honours degree. In September of 2005 he received a M.Sc. scholarship from the European Social Fund in order to attend the M.Sc. course in Shellfish Biology, Fisheries and Culture at Bangor University. Under supervision of Dr. Lewis Le Vay, he was able to study the physiology of soft corals and the impact of standard husbandry practices. By this time he had become interested in questions about how organisms respond and adapt to stressful conditions and he thought that the volcanic islands of Azores would be an appropriate ?natural laboratory? to address such questions. He started collaborating with a research group in the Universidade dos Acores and after some months applied to the Science Foundation of the Regional Government of Azores (SRCT) for a PhD scholarship with the project entitled ?The effects of extreme environments of volcanic origin in organisms using earthworms as models? (Grant M3.1.2/F/029/2007-RTF/3). At the time he found that studying the particular and unique features of the reducing environments of geothermal biotopes (i.e. the combination of elevated soil, water, and atmospheric elemental composition, together with constant diffuse degassing and high temperatures) was most interesting because the ephemeral nature of the geothermal field is expected to favour the colonization by species with remarkable colonization abilities. During his Ph.D. studies the scale of his research changed from tissue and cell marker analyses to the molecular level, enabling the study a population of earthworms living, in what he like to describe as a volcanic furnace of evolution, a geothermal field in Sao Miguel Island. In order to increase the expertise he initiated collaboration with Prof. John Morgan and Peter Kille at Cardiff University and together they wrote a research proposal that was graded as Excellent and successfully funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation (?120,000; Grant PTDC/AAC-AMB/115713/2009). With these funds he was able to genetically characterise a population of earthworms living inside the geothermal field including among others the identification of various loci under positive selection and which likely reflect the worm?s adaptation to the extreme volcanic environmental conditions. During his Ph.D. and under the supervision of Prof. Armindo Rodrigues (Universidade dos Acores), he was able to provide teaching assistance to undergraduate students and later, after completing the Ph.D., to postgraduate students, delivering content mainly focused on topics related to invertebrate anatomy, physiology and ecotoxicology. Building on our previous collaboration he assisted Prof. Morgan and Peter Kille in the structuring of a grant application to NERC in order to extend his Ph.D. studies. The project entitled ?Stress in a hot place? was seen as an attractive project and was successfully funded (NE/I026022/1). At the present moment he works as a research associate in Prof. P. Kille?s lab, where he have continued conducting studies using his favourite organism, the earthworm. With the advent of next generation technologies (NGS) he had the opportunity to participate in the assembly of several invertebrate genomes, among which Pontoscolex corethurus.

Possui graduação em Biologia, ramo Ambiente pela Universidade dos Açores (2005), mestrado em "M.Sc. in Shellfish Biology, Culture and Fisheries" - Bangor University (2006) e doutorado em Biologia Celular e Molecular pela Universidade dos Açores (2012). Atualmente é investigador associado - Cardiff University. Tem experiência na área de Genética, com ênfase em Genomica atuando principalmente nos seguintes temas: ecotoxicogenomica, bioinformatica, filogeografia e genetica de populacoes, construcao de genomas eucariotas e expressao genica.