Philipp Brand, Ph.D.

Philipp Brand is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Vanessa Ruta at the Rockefeller University. He holds a B.S. in biology and an M.S. in genetics and evolution from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, and a Ph.D. in population biology from the University of California, Davis.

Brand studies the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying the evolution of behavior and how behavioral diversification contributes to the origin and divergence of species. During his Ph.D. studies in the laboratory of Dr. Santiago Ramírez, he investigated the genetic evolution of the sense of smell in insects and how it mediates the diversification of sexual signaling and speciation in orchid bees. In his current postdoctoral research, he integrates evolutionary biology with sensory and circuit neuroscience to gain a detailed mechanistic understanding of how the nervous system evolves appropriate species-specific behavioral repertoires. To date, Brand’s work has been supported by several national and international funding agencies, and he received multiple awards for his publications, conference contributions and thesis work.