Professor of Chemistry
Matt Pratt is a chemical biologist broadly interested in applying chemical techniques to investigate important questions in biology. His research currently focuses on the development of bioorthogonal chemical reporters and synthetic proteins to investigate the role of posttranslational modifications, with a particular interest in the intracellular form of glycosylation termed O-GlcNAc modification.
Matt received a B.S. in Biochemistry and Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 1999, where he worked for Robin Polt on glycosylation reactions and the synthesis of glycosylated analogs of enkephalin peptides. He then moved to Carolyn Bertozzi’s lab at the University of California Berkeley and focused on the synthesis of complex carbohydrates and the development of chemical tools to analyze glycosylation, receiving a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2004. He was then an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in Tom Muir’s lab at Rockefeller University, where he developed technologies to control proteins in living cells and for the incorporation of modifications into semi-synthetic proteins. He joined the faculty at USC in 2009.