Matthew Tuttle
Title: IB PhD Student
Dept/Program: Biology
Email: mat149@zips.uakron.edu
Biography
Greetings, audience. I like science but not just canonical biology; that’s why I applied to the I.B. program. My primary fields of interest include: human genetics, biochemistry, bioenergetics, and computational biology. I research under the guidance of Dr. Richard Londraville in the biology department where we study the zebrafish leptin (lep) signal transduction pathway. My collegiate education started at Kent State University where I earned my B.S. in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2013. As an undergraduate, I genotyped plant microsatellite DNA sequences as part of my individual investigation. After graduation, I worked in the private sector as a lab analyst before starting my M.S. in Biology at UA in the Fall of 2014. My M.S. thesis explored whole-transcriptome microarray expression data for functional enrichment represented by translational repression of leptin in embryonic zebrafish. I plan to pursue leptin, a pleiotropic cytokine best characterized for its role in mammalian obesity, as a future model of study. With the advent of next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, enhancing my competencies in computer science is a requirement to perform large-scale data analysis of expression and sequence data. I plan to use the interface between computational and experimental biology as a means to address questions related to the molecular function of leptin in my dissertation.
Education
- M.S. in Biology; University of Akron
- B.S. in Cellular and Molecular Biology; Kent State University