Why the brain grows vulnerable
Felipe Court is one of Chile’s foremost neuroscientists, and the second of the two Felipes who brought the quest to Santiago (the other, Felipe Salech, is a geriatrician — interviewed the same day). Where Salech looks at the whole ageing person, Court goes deep into a single organ: the brain, and why it becomes vulnerable as we age.
His starting fact is the one that reframes all of neurology: age is the single biggest risk factor for neurodegenerative disease. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and the rest are, first and foremost, diseases of ageing — which means understanding brain ageing is the way in to preventing them.
His laboratory work sits at a precise level of that problem: the axon — the long fibre that carries a neuron’s signal — and the mitochondria that power it. A decline in mitochondrial function shows up across many age-dependent neurodegenerative diseases, and axonal degeneration is often where the damage begins. Court’s Courtlab in Santiago works on exactly these mechanisms.
His standing in the field is serious. He earned his PhD at Edinburgh, where it was named the UK’s best by the British Neuroscience Association; he held an EMBO fellowship in Milan; and from 2015 to 2023 he directed GERO, Chile’s flagship centre for brain health and metabolism. He is a professor at Universidad Mayor and an adjunct professor at the Buck Institute in California — and in 2021 became the first Chilean named an EMBO Associate member.
Together, the two Felipes make Chile one of the quiet surprises of the quest: a country not on the usual longevity map, doing rigorous, unhyped work on the two things that decide whether a long life is worth living — a body that keeps moving, and a brain that keeps working.
