Bryan Martinez is a Post-Doctoral Associate in the Gill Lab. He went to school at the University of Alabama and studied Biology as an Undergraduate. He joined the lab of Dr. Kim Caldwell who runs a joint lab with her husband Dr. Guy Caldwell for graduate school also at The University of Alabama. There he studied C. elegans molecular models of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson, Alzheimer, ALS, and Huntington Disease. These models in C. elegans make use of humanized worm lines expressing aggregate prone proteins which cause cellular dysfunction and cellular death as a product of ageing. A significant portion of his graduate work focused on gene-by-environment interactions whereby environmental stressors interact with innate genetic defects to lead to exacerbation of molecular damage. For his dissertation he investigated the role that mitochondrial quality control plays in gene-by-environment interactions, especially the mitochondrial unfolded protein response and mitophagy. After finishing his graduate work, Bryan took a post-doctoral position with Dr. Matt Gill who uses C. elegans to study metabolism and hormonal regulation of animal physiology, development, and ageing. During his post-doctoral position, he has studied an alternatively spliced isoform of the C. elegans insulin receptor which acts as a decoy receptor in vivo, inducing insulin resistance through competition for endogenously expressed ligands and is currently working on mechanisms of genetic regulation of this isoform.
