Matthew was awarded his Master’s degree at Northwestern Medical in 1999 for his work studying behavioral neuroscience in aged rodents. In 2005, at Baylor College of Medicine he received a PhD in Biochemistry for his work on proteins that regulate human telomeres. Postdoctoral research includes work at UC Berkeley on muscle stem cells and aging. Since 2010, Dr. O’Connor has headed up the MitoSENS project at the research center in Mountain View, California. His research is focused on “allotopic expression” of mitochondrial genes where his team is engineering mitochondrial genes to be expressed from the nucleus and targeted to the mitochondia. Since 2012 Dr. O’Connor has had broad oversight over many areas of research at SRF. Matthew O’Connor is passionate about performing basic research to combat the diseases and disabilities of aging.