Remise de la Medaille Chevreul 2017 à S. Cunnane

Stephen Cunnane was awarded with the 2017 Chevreul medal during the "Journées Chevreul" lipids and brain held in Nancy october 2017

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. During the 80’s, he explored several aspects of lipids metabolism and specifically on the impact of trace elements on essential fatty acid metabolism such as magnesium. Then he was a faculty member in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Toronto (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, Stephen 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 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. His recent experimental data suggest that oral ketogenic supplements are the most promising means to overcome brain energy deficit in Alzheimer disease.

He has published over 280 peer-reviewed research papers and was elected to the French National Academy of Medicine in 2009. Stephen 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).

Remise de la Medaille Chevreul 2017 à P. Legrand

The French researcher Philippe Legrand was awarded with the 2017 Chevreul medal during the EuroFedLipid (www.eurofedlipid.org), this August in Uppsala (Sweden).

He received his PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry from University of Paris in 1987 and performed a post-doc at Cornell University (USA) in the Division of Nutritional Sciences. He is Professor and chairman of the laboratory of Biochemistry and Human Nutrition in the Agronomic University of Rennes (Agrocampus).
For more than 30 years, he performs research on fundamental aspects of fatty acid synthesis and metabolism. More precisely, he worked on the role of delta-9 desaturase in adiposity and obesity in animal and human. He worked on delta-6 and delta-5 fatty acid desaturation showing that the conversion of poly-unsaturated fatty acid of the n-6 and n-3 series shared the same desaturases, leading to the competition between series and subsequent recommendations on the required n-6/n-3 balance in human diet.
He works also since 12 years on saturated fatty acids, showing their nutritional interest and the necessary evolution to distinguish between short/middle/long chain saturated fatty acids. He worked more precisely on their acylation function.
Philippe Legrand is chairman since 1998 of the French guidelines committees for the fatty acid dietary recommendations, in the Food Safety Agency (ANSES) where he proposed a new approach for considering saturated fatty acids.
He has published over 130 peer-reviewed research or review papers and book chapters, plus more than 200 international scientific presentations including nutritional recommendations. Philippe Legrand has published a book, “Coup de pied dans le plat”, Hachette Marabout ed., 2015.