Matthew Bechard

Background

About Matthew Bechard

My overall career goal is to understand how intracellular signals integrate with the extracellular environment to balance progenitor maintenance with lineage specification. Understanding these concepts are critical to our understanding of how to effectively treat and perhaps even cure a human disease. I am an experienced academic research scientist with over 20 years of experience in academic research across multiple areas of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell and developmental biology. During my Ph.D. I worked on understanding molecular signaling pathways regulating the self-renewal and differentiation of embryonic stem cells. As a post-doc I was a key player in multiple projects that designed, from the ground up, tools and strategies for understanding the behavior and propagation of endocrine progenitor populations during pancreas organogenesis. During my current career stage as a research scientist, I have focused the skills and knowledge gained during my training to increase our understanding of the growth and progression of both pancreatic cancer and, more recently, colorectal cancer.