Matthew Gentry PhD

Dr. Matthew S. Gentry is a Professor & Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in the College of Medicine at the University of Florida. He is a prominent brain metabolism scientist who has made seminal discoveries in the realm of brain glycogen and glucose metabolism and how perturbations in these pathways impact neuro-centric diseases. Dr. Gentry has nearly 20 years of experience working on glycogen storage diseases (GSD). He did research on cell signaling and cell division at Syracuse University for his Ph.D in Molecular Biology (2003) and then worked on the GSD and childhood dementia called Lafora disease as a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Jack Dixon at UC-San Diego where he defined the biochemical properties of the genes mutated in the disease. Building on this foundational biochemistry, he has been continuously funded by NIH since 2007 via a K99/R00; multiple R01 grants; a P01; a recent R35 that focuses on Brain Glycogen – Metabolism, Mechanisms, and Therapeutic Potential; other NIH grants; and funding from foundations and industry. He has also been continuously funded by NSF since receiving an NSF CAREER award in 2013 to study the enzymology and structure/function of metabolic enzymes. His lab works on several CNS-centric GSDs, Alzheimer’s disease, and the role of glycogen in both lung cancer and Ewing sarcoma. The lab focuses on defining disease mechanisms, developing pre-clinical drugs, and establishing clinical biomarkers. He has published >100 scientific papers and holds multiple patents.