Matt Anderson
Credentials: Medical Genetics
Position title: Associate Professor
Email: mzanderson@wisc.edu
Website: Anderson Lab
Address:
4434 Genetics-Biotechnology Center
Education
Ph.D., Stanford University
Representative Awards
- Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2025)
- Elected co-director of the Summer internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics (2025)
- American Society of Microbiology Member Spotlight (2021)
Research
The Anderson Lab is interested in how genetic diversity contributes to variation in species populations. To address these questions we utilize the major human fungal pathogen Candida albicans, a harmless commensal of the gastrointestinal tract and opportunistic pathogen. This yeast has an incredibly plastic genome capable of undergoing full ploidy shifts, haboring aneuploidy, experiencing large-scale loss of heterozygosity, and rapidly acquiring mutation. We take advantage of these processes to understand how members of expanded gene families have obtained function in the context of many other paralogs as well as defining the relationship between genotype and phenotype with respect to the balance between commensalism and pathogenesis. Additional work in the lab centers on understanding the role of microbial eukaryotes in the human microbiome. We recently developed a system to analyze the ‘eukaryome’ via metagenomics and are applying this technique with our Lakota partners in investigating links to autoimmunity within their community.
Representative Publications (PUBMED)
Parasex generates highly recombinant progeny in Candida albicans with increased virulence. Nat Microbiol. 2026 Feb;11(2):522-534. doi: 10.1038/s41564-025-02247-6.
Aneuploidy confers a unique transcriptional and phenotypic profile to Candida albicans. Nat Commun. 2025 Apr 6;16(1):3287. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-58457-3.
A relational framework for microbiome research with Indigenous communities. Nat Microbiol. 2023 Oct;8(10):1768-1776. doi: 10.1038/s41564-023-01471-2.