Matt Simon, PhD

Matt grew up in Ann Arbor, MI and received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley. He commuted between Berkeley and UCSF, working with Kevan Shokat developing chemical methods to make synthetic chromatin substrates to study the biochemistry of epigenetics. He continued this work as a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation post doctoral fellow in Robert Kingston's laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where his interests expanded to include large non-coding RNAs and their impact on chromatin. In 2012 he joined the faculty at Yale. He is part of the Institute for Bimolecular Design & Discovery on Yale's West Campus, and The Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, where his group's research focuses on chromatin and RNA biology using techniques that rely on the principles of organic chemistry and biochemistry. To study RNA population dynamics, the Simon laboratory has developed chemical techniques based on metabolic labeling of RNA using 4-thiouridine including TimeLapse-sequencing, an approach that allows new RNAs to be identified in a sequencing experiment without the need for biochemical purification. These chemical approaches have been used within Simon lab and by others to provide insight into regulated changes in gene expression at many time scales and illuminate how these RNA dynamics change in disease. Most recently, the Simon lab has discovered acetyl-methyllysine (Kacme) an abundant posttranslational modification that marks chromatin at transcription start sites and can be bound by important transcriptional regulators.