Matthew Aronson

Matthew is a senior Schreyer Honors Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University working towards a degree in Biomedical Engineering with a biochemical focus. Matthew spent the summer of 2018 as an undergraduate research assistant with Jonathan Soboloff at Temple University’s Fels Institute for Cancer Research & Molecular Biology. His work focused on calcium signaling across cancer cell membranes and how the fluctuations change with metastasis. Additionally, he conducted detailed data analysis using MATLAB and GraphPad Prism of this signaling, which led to his authorship on a peer reviewed paper in Science Signaling. The following summer, Matthew was awarded the DAAD RISE Fellowship to conduct research at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern in Germany. During his time there, he investigated the presence of antimicrobial compounds secreted by terrestrial cyanobacteria, working to extract, purify, and characterize them.
In our lab, Matthew began work on an independent project in 2017 on the localized delivery of therapeutic anticancer peptides via a designed fusolytic nanoparticle, which was termed a lipopeptisome. This work culminated in a publication in Acta Biomaterialia, and has been presented orally at the Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia (2018) as well as the Controlled Release Society Annual Meeting & Exposition in Valencia, Spain (2019). His current work involves the repurposing of antimicrobial peptides into combinatorial anticancer drugs for enhanced chemotherapeutic efficacy. For this project, he took on the additional responsibility of mentoring a fellow undergraduate student. As this project concludes, his focus will continue on the combination of lipopeptisomes with antimicrobial implications.