- Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Yale University
- Associate Professor, Institute of Biomolecular Design & Discovery, Yale University
Dr. Matt Simon is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and Associate Professor in the Institute of Biomolecular Design & Discovery at Yale University. He grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and received his PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley, where he worked with Kevan Shokat developing chemical methods to create synthetic chromatin substrates to study the biochemistry of epigenetics. He subsequently completed a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in Robert Kingston’s laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, where his interests expanded to include large non-coding RNAs and their impact on chromatin. He joined the Yale faculty in 2012.
Dr. Simon’s research focuses on chromatin and RNA biology, employing techniques rooted in organic chemistry and biochemistry. To study RNA population dynamics, his laboratory developed TimeLapse-sequencing, a chemical approach based on metabolic labeling of RNA using 4-thiouridine that allows newly synthesized RNAs to be identified in sequencing experiments without biochemical purification. This and related approaches have illuminated regulated changes in gene expression across many time scales and shed light on how RNA dynamics are altered in disease. Most recently, the Simon lab discovered acetyl-methyllysine (Kacme), an abundant post-translational modification that marks chromatin at transcription start sites and can be bound by key transcriptional regulators.