Matthew Van Hook, PhD

Dr. Matthew Van Hook is an assistant professor in the Truhlsen Eye Institute and the Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in Omaha, NE. After completing his undergraduate degree with a major in biology at Hamilton College in upstate New York, Dr. Van Hook earned his PhD. in Neuroscience at Brown University, where he studied how retinal dopamine alters the responses of retinal output neurons responsible for regulating sleep, mood, and pupil constriction. For postdoctoral training at UNMC, Dr. Van Hook received fellowship grant support from the National Institutes of Health to study processes regulating synaptic transmission and early-stage encoding of visual information by rod and cone photoreceptors. He established his own laboratory in 2016. The Van Hook lab uses a variety of cutting-edge neuroscience techniques to probe the basic signaling properties of retinal synapses and to determine how synaptic transmission in the retina and the brain is altered during blinding neurodegenerative diseases.