Matthew D. Disney

Professor and Chair, Department of Chemistry, Scripps Research

Dr. Disney is currently a full professor in the bi-coastal Department of Chemistry and the Department of Neuroscience at The Scripps Research Institute. His laboratory is focused on understanding RNA-ligand interactions and exploiting this information to rationally design small molecules that modulate RNA function or toxicity from sequence. He has received numerous awards including the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, Blavatnik Young Investigator Award in Chemistry National Finalist, The Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award, Camille & Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award, The Camille & Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award, The University at Buffalo Exceptional Scholar Young Investigator Award, the Eli Lily Award in Biological Chemistry from the American Chemical Society, the David W. Robertson Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry from the American Chemical Society, and the David Y. Gin New Investigator Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Dr. Disney received his early schooling in the Baltimore Catholic School System, his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Rochester. As a graduate student, under the guidance of Professor Douglas H. Turner, he studied catalysis of group I introns and developed approaches to determine RNA secondary structure in cells by using a combination of experiment and prediction. Dr. Disney completed postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH; Zürich, Switzerland) in Professor Peter H. Seeberger’s lab, he studied organic synthesis and glycobiology, developing the broadly used carbohydrate microarray platform.