Matthew is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Nutrition and in the Department of Pharmacology & Cancer Biology at Duke University Medical Center, and is a faculty member of the Sarah W. Stedman Nutrition and Metabolism Center at Duke.

He obtained a Bachelors of Science at the University of Vermont, and earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Alison Butler. 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 discovered acetylation is a mitochondrial protein modification that regulates fatty acid oxidation, and loss of SIRT3 in mice and humans results in the accelerated development of the metabolic syndrome, where his work appeared in high-profile journals, including Nature, Cell Metabolism, and Molecular Cell. He received numerous awards including the Gladstone Institute Post-Doctoral Award for Scientific Excellence, and more recently an Innovator Award from the American Heart Association and an early career development award from the Central Society for Clinical Research. His work is supported by grants from the American Heart Association and Duke University institutional support.

[Read more about Matthew's scientific journey].

Matthew joined Duke University Medical Center in 2011, where his lab studies how chemical modifications to proteins in the mitochondria integrate metabolic signals and energy balance.

matthew.hirschey@duke.edu