Investiture Program for Matthew B. Frieman, PhD

MATTHEW B. FRIEMAN, PHD
Matthew Frieman, PhD is a Professor in the
Department of Microbiology and Immunology
at the University of Maryland School of
Medicine. His research focuses on highly
pathogenic coronaviruses including the Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus
(SARS-CoV), the Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and now
SARS-CoV-2. Throughout his work he has
balanced the study of the biology of these
viruses with developing therapeutics against
them. His work has been funded by NIH,
BARDA, DARPA, The Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation and many industry partners,
especially as SARS-CoV-2 emerged.
Dr. Frieman grew up in Owings Mills, MD where he graduated Owings Mills High
School in 1994 before attending Washington University in St. Louis where he
majored in Biology. There he had the privilege to work all four years of college in
the lab of Dr. Craig Pikaard working on ribosomal RNA silencing. It was there that
he learned to love working in a lab, figuring out how to answer scientific questions
and messing up countless experiments. It was there that he met Dr. Jill Fahrner,
whom he would marry in 2003.
He returned to Baltimore in 1998 and received his PhD at the Johns Hopkins School
of Medicine where he worked in the lab of Dr. Brendan Cormack on yeast cell wall
proteins. He was Dr. Cormack’s first graduate student and was able to see how to run
a lab from the early stages of its development. Here he built his molecular biology
skills and developed a love for yeast, which he uses in his laboratory today.
After his PhD, Dr. Frieman followed his wife to North Carolina where she was
finishing her MD/PhD, and he started a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004 to study coronaviruses in the laboratory of Dr.
Ralph Baric. SARS-CoV had emerged in 2003 and Dr. Baric was a longtime
coronavirus researcher at the forefront of studying this new virus. His postdoctoral
work focused on the identification of several SARS-CoV proteins that helped the
virus block the immune response during infection, and how the host responded to
SARS-CoV infection.
In 2009, Dr. Frieman returned to Baltimore as an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Microbiology and Immunology to start his laboratory continuing his
work on coronaviruses. Since then, he has studied SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV (which
emerged in 2012) and now SARS-CoV-2 with a focus on understanding the basic
biology of these viruses, how they cause disease and developing therapeutics to fight
them. Early in his research on coronaviruses, he focused on building animal models
to study how the host responds to infection, and what pathways and proteins the
viruses need to replicate and cause disease. These models laid the groundwork for
research on coronavirus therapeutics, initially for SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but
rapidly expanded to the study of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. His lab has collaborated
with many researchers and companies over the years including Regeneron, Novavax,
AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly on SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics.