Matthew Jorgensen, PhD

About Matthew Jorgensen

Matthew Jorgensen, PhD, first worked with nonhuman primates as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts. His interest in animal behavior continued at the University of California at Riverside, where he earned a master’s and doctoral degree in comparative psychology. He completed research fellowships at Harvard Medical School’s New England Regional Primate Research Center and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), investigating self-injurious behavior in macaques and the effects of methamphetamine use on brain neurotoxicity and behavior in vervet monkeys.

Following his postdoctoral studies, Jorgensen worked at UCLA for seven years managing a National Institutes of Health-supported nonhuman primate breeding colony, a biomedical resource used for multi-categorical research. In 2008, he joined Wake Forest School of Medicine’s pathology/comparative medicine faculty when the grant and colony were transferred to the institution.

Jorgensen manages and facilitates intramural and extramural studies utilizing a breeding colony of more than 300 vervet/African green monkeys. Under his guidance, the colony operates as a national resource for primate-related research studies focused on disease prevention and therapy. He provides animals, samples, data, tissues, training and consultation on use of this nonhuman primate species for biomedical research, focusing on collaborations in immunology, diabetes, aging, growth, development and chronic disease. He has the capability to model numerous disease states and can provide animals of known age, sex, health characteristics, diet consumption and specific genotypes.

Using nonhuman primates as a translational species, Jorgensen facilitates numerous studies in immunology and vaccine development, diabetes and metabolism, and developmental brain imaging. Recent partnerships with industry have explored the efficacy of a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine in adult African green monkeys and drug development for diabetes. He also studies the effectiveness of a novel surgical anesthetic compound using neonatal nonhuman primate models.