Matthew Hirschey is a tenured Associate Professor at Duke University in the Departments of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Nutrition and Pharmacology & Cancer Biology, and is a faculty member of the Duke Molecular Physiology Institute where his lab is located.
He obtained a Bachelor’s of Science at the University of Vermont, and received several undergraduate awards, including a research thesis in Chemistry. He earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Alison Butler, where he combined inorganic semiconductor research with microbiology, exploring new applications in bio-materials research. He was a post-doctoral research fellow with Eric Verdin at the Gladstone Institutes at the University of California in San Francisco, where he studied the function of acetylation and deacetylation by the enzyme SIRT3 in the mitochondria. He identified acetylation is a mitochondrial protein modification that regulates fatty acid oxidation, and loss of SIRT3 in mice and man results in the accelerated development of the metabolic syndrome.
Dr. Hirschey, who started his lab at Duke in 2011, studies how cells integrate nutrient sensing and metabolism. He is particularly interested in how metabolites and chemical modifications control metabolism. Metabolic regulation is important for several physiological states and disease processes, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and the aging process.