Affiliation: Villanova University

Dr. Matthew Youngman is an Associate Professor of Biology at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Along with teaching courses in genetics, cell biology, the human microbiome, and aging, he supervises a team of undergraduate and master’s students in his lab. Dr. Youngman’s research program takes a primarily genetic approach in C. elegans to investigate the mechanistic basis of physiological resilience during aging with an emphasis on the maintenance of homeodynamic space at the cellular level. Before coming to Villanova, Dr. Youngman was funded through the Cancer Research Institute while training as a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Dennis Kim’s lab at MIT. While there, he studied invertebrate immuno-senescence and found that in C. elegans the age-dependent reduction in innate immunity can be attributed to a progressive decline in the function of the pmk-1 p38/MAPK signaling pathway. Dr. Youngman earned his PhD in cell biology in Dr. Rob Jensen’s lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he studied mitochondrial morphology in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. He is a proud alum of Pepperdine University, where he worked in Dr. David Green’s analytical chemistry lab while earning his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry.