Hello MMCRI Colleagues - message from Matt Lynes

Hello MMCRI colleagues! My name is Matt Lynes (pronounced “Lines”) and I am a newly appointed Faculty Scientist I in the Center for Molecular Medicine. It was suggested that I write a blog to introduce myself, although I’ve already had the pleasure of meeting a lot of you. For those of you that I haven’t met, I look forward to it, so I hope you introduce yourself if you see me lost in the hallways! 

I prefer to be called Matt, and I use the pronouns he, him and his. I tell people that I’ve lived in New England my entire life, but I have a dirty secret; I was actually born in Albany, New York and lived there until I was 18 months old. Since then, it’s been all NE, namely Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts. I went to Colby College and Boston University where I earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology and a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology, respectively. In between I worked for a pharmaceutical company called Biogen IDEC and as a technician at the Broad Institute. After BU, I moved to the Joslin Diabetes Center where I’ve been working on different projects aimed at understanding how the body expends stored energy to maintain temperature in cold environments, with the goal of developing therapies that mimic the cold to activate energy expenditure in patients with metabolic syndrome.






I am coming to MMCRI from Watertown, Massachusetts, where I have lived with my wife Maureen and my daughters Grace and Lucy for the past 3 years. Maureen (I often call her Mo) and I met at Colby and have lived in the Boston area since 2005, either going to grad school or working in biotech ever since. Currently, Maureen is an Associate Director at Accent Therapeutics where she is working to develop several cancer drugs. My daughter Grace is starting second grade and loves drawing, dogs, and collecting sea glass on the beach. My daughter Lucy turns 4 at the end of September. Lucy enjoys really anything that she gets to do with her older sister Grace.


























My favorite things are my wife and my daughters, but I’m partial to the Boston Celtics and the UCONN Huskies as well. I also enjoy fishing and embedded electronics, which may not sound like the most normal pair of hobbies but they both have their thrills for me.


























The weird keyboard is one of my projects called a macropad. All of the buttons can automatically run different shortcuts on my computer, and by rotating the knob on the top, different sets of shortcuts can be scrolled through that are helpful for different applications. The labels on the keys are jokes, as the screen on the top displays the current shortcut assignments for each key. Suffice it to say the holiday lights at my house get pretty elaborate. We are still in the process of moving up to Scarborough. I’m sure many of you have heard how crazy the real estate market is these days and I can confirm this is absolutely true. We can’t wait to officially be Mainers, and we are very, very happy to be a part of Maine Medical Center Research Institute.

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