Ben Matthews

Ben Matthews is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Physiology Group of the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Matthews is also a member of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, the Biodiversity Research Centre, and the Genome Science and Technology training program. He received a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in the Neurosciences and a Scholar Award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. His lab’s research program is focused on understanding the sensory systems of mosquitoes using genetic, genomic, and neurobiological approaches.

He received a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the California Institute of Technology in 2004 and completed his graduate research at Columbia University of Wes Grueber, where he worked on the phenomenon of “self-avoidance” during the development of sensory neuron dendritic arbors in Drosophila melanogaster. He then completed his postdoctoral training with Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University/HHMI, where he focused on genetics, genomics, and behavior in the mosquito Aedes aegypti, a deadly vector of arbivoral pathogens that cause Zika, Dengue fever, yellow fever, and Chikungunya. He received postdoctoral fellowships from the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research and The Rockefeller University, as well as a predoctoral NRSA F31 from the NIH.

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