Matthew Girgenti, PhD

Matthew Girgent’s research is directed at determining the molecular pathologies underlying stress disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), major depressive disorder (MDD), and suicidal behavior. His lab identifies therapeutic and biomarker targets relevant to those disorders by utilizing human brain derived data from frozen postmortem tissue. The research is focused on the connection between stress and brain functions. His lab employs functional genomics to dissect transcriptomic and cell-type-specific regulatory elements and risk loci underlying the genetics of stress-related mental disorders and engages in translational research using animal models and donor-derived human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) to validate causal genes and variants. In addition, the lab employs "big data" approaches to investigate single cell-type molecular dysregulations of complex neuropsychiatric traits to gain a deeper understanding of the individual differences in the expression of symptoms. Together, this work is contributing importantly to the evolving understanding of PTSD and depression and their treatment at the molecular, cellular, and behavioral levels. These ambitious projects seek to characterize the transcriptomes and chromatin accessibility profiles of individual cell types within the human postmortem prefrontal cortex and subcortical structures, regions with direct relevance to human cognition.

Girgenti is a molecular neuroscientist interested in the neurogenomics of psychiatric disorders such as PTSD, depression and alcohol use disorder. He did his PhD at the University of Connecticut and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale before joining the faculty. He lives on a scenic horse farm in southwest Connecticut with his wife and two children.