Matt King Assistant Professor

Matt earned his B.S. from the University of Delaware before spending two years as a post-baccalaureate IRTA fellow in the lab of Elissa Lei at the NIH researching chromatin insulation. He completed his Ph.D. with Sabine Petry at Princeton University in 2019, studying an intrinsically disordered protein that catalyzes branching microtubule nucleation. As a postdoctoral scholar—first in the lab of Rohit Pappu at Washington University in St. Louis, and then jointly with Cigall Kadoch at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School— Matt combined microscopy, analytical chemistry tools, and polymer physics concepts to demonstrate that nuclear bodies harbor distinct physicochemical microenvironments encoded by intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). His efforts also led to the development of a proteome-spanning resource that predicts IDR function from sequence.

He joined the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Weill Cornell in September 2026.