Matthew J. Girgenti, Ph.D.

Matthew J. Girgenti, Ph.D.
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2023, 2019 Young Investigator Grant

Matthew J. Girgenti, Ph.D.

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Assistant Professor of Psychiatry

Yale School of Medicine

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bbrf awards icon Bio

Dr. Matt Girgenti is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. He is a neuroscientist and molecular biologist and a member of the Division of Molecular Psychiatry and the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale. He is also a VA-NCPTSD Research Scientist at the West Haven VA Medical Center. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Connecticut in molecular neuroscience. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in Molecular Psychiatry at Yale followed by a VA Career Development fellowship in postmortem brain genomics. His early research focused on the epigenetic basis of schizophrenia using neural stem cells to demonstrate a role for the SCZ-risk gene ZNF804a as a gene transcription regulator. During his postdoc, his research focused on the cell-type-specific effects of rapid antidepressants, including ketamine and scopolamine using pharmacogenomic approaches. During his VA Career Development fellowship he worked on human postmortem studies focused on the functional genomics of neuropsychiatric disorders, specifically PTSD and major depression. He published the first genome-wide transcriptomic study of the human PTSD brain (Girgenti MJ, et al. 2021). His research now focuses on genomic studies of the postmortem human brain, combining molecular biology and bioinformatics to understand the neurobiology of major brain and behavioral disorders, including depression, PTSD, and alcohol use disorder.

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