Associate Professor of Neurology
1717 6th Ave South, SRC 556, Birmingham, AL 35294
mattgoldberg@uab.edu
Dr. Goldberg received his B.S. in physics from the University of Michigan. His Ph.D. thesis research in the laboratory of Arthur Horwich at Yale focused on cellular mechanisms of protein folding and aggregation. He then sought to study protein aggregation in relation to neurodegeneration. He began his postdoctoral training studying α-synuclein in the laboratory of Dr. Peter T. Lansbury, Jr. at Harvard Medical School. When mutations in α-synuclein were identified as the first genetic mutations causally linked to Parkinson’s disease (PD), he seized the opportunity to train in the neighboring laboratory of Dr. Jie Shen to generate animal models of PD based on mutations linked to familial PD. During his training in Dr. Shen’s laboratory, he generated α-synuclein transgenic mice, Parkin knockout mice and DJ-1 knockout mice, as PD-linked mutations in these genes were identified. As an Assistant Professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dr. Goldberg and his laboratory extended his mechanistic investigations of mutations causally linked to PD to include the roles of inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and oxidative stress in PD-related neurodegeneration. Since moving to UAB in 2014, his laboratory has been studying mouse and rat models of Parkinson’s disease, supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
