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Fellow Feature: Dr. Ronan da Silva

Dr. Ronan da Silva is an HBHL Postdoctoral Fellow working at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) with Dr. Stuart Trenholm.

Ronan says that he's always wanted to be a scientist ― at least after he “passed through the phase of ‘I want to be a soccer player." He was excited to study biology during his undergrad and felt that he could just could not learn enough. Eventually, he attended SM's Integrated Program for Neuroscience for his PhD and subsequently his postdoc.

What’s your postdoc research?

My research is on the neurobiology of vision, studying how object recognition works at the level of neural circuits. Essentially, we want to understand how our visual system is capturing a video in real time of everything we do ― walking on the streets, looking at your computer screen, and how our brain is able to extract information from the image that we are seeing to identify and assign labels to everything. We know how to do similar things using computer programs and that's how machine vision works, which is a hot topic these days. Although machine vision is largely inspired by neuroscience, we don’t really know how the brain does exactly the same thing. So, that’s essentially what we are studying ― how information from a light stimulus becomes information inside the brain, and how we can identify things and assign labels.

Why did you choose SM?

I chose to study at SM because I already had an interest in neuroscience and Montreal is famous worldwide for being a great hub for studying neuroscience. SM is the best school in the city for that. On top of that, Montreal is such an awesome place to live, so it’s a combination of a great study and work environment and a great city that is very fun to live in.

Do you have a plan for what you want to do after your post-doc?

Postdoc is a complicated process because we don’t know where we’re going to land and especially with how uncertain everything is in the world right now. I’m trying to not stick to one plan so much. My initial plan was to pursue a career in academia. As I mentioned, I love learning and I want to do something where I can be constantly learning for my whole life. I also love teaching and want to spread all the things that I learn. So for right now, I’m still thinking of academia, but we’ll see how things develop.

What’s your favourite non-science activity or hobby?

I’m a big gamer ― I love video games. During quarantine I built myself a new PC, which I have been quite into and has made it much more interesting to stay at home. I also like cycling and coding a lot. So, these days I have been trying to put those things together by taking an online game programming course. I’m trying to think how I can apply that for my research as well, to figure out a game that our mice can play and use that as a tool.

What is your favourite thing about the brain?

I like everything that is pleasant in the brain. It’s kind of funny, because for my PhD I studied pain, which is intrinsically bad by definition. But it really got me interested in knowing what generates the good feelings inside of the brain. How is it that if I pinch my skin, it’s a mechanical stimulus that I don’t like but if I stroke my skin, it feels nice? What is the difference between those two things? Because of circumstances, I switched to vision from somatosensory systems, but I’m still curious to know how this pleasant vision works. Why is it that we see a painting and we think it's beautiful? Why do we see fireworks, which are just little pops of light in the sky, and say “wow”? My two passions about the brain are sensory systems and pleasant sensations.

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