H. Matthew Berns

Matthew is from Westerville, OH, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 2015. As an undergraduate he conducted research in the lab of Dr. Bruce Jayne. His research focused on the interaction of arboreal snakes with their environment, where it was shown that body shape and surface features (e.g. roughness and incline) have immense impact on modality and speed of locomotion across species.

After college, Matthew pursued further research in the lab of Dr. James Wells at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He studied neural crest biology in the context of enteric nervous system formation of the murine and human foregut. He developed a passion for the neural crest, or so called “4th germ layer”, which is a remarkable embryonic cell type that gives rise to a vast array of terminally differentiated cells and tissues – including chondrocytes, bone, neurons, Schwann cells, chromaffin cells of the adrenal medulla, and melanocytes.

As a medical student at Ohio University, Matthew sought out further research experience through the NIH Medical Research Scholars Program. He joined the lab of Dr. William J. Pavan, with whom he will continue his doctoral studies along with Drs. Pedro Moura Alves and Colin Goding at Oxford. His work will focus on the factors regulating melanin production and how aberrations in these pathways can lead to and/or exacerbate the course of melanoma. Upon completion of his doctoral studies, Matthew plans to become a pediatric geneticist with a focus on rare disease medicine. He aims to model neurocristopathies with the goal of developing novel clinical treatment modalities.