The UAB Department of Pediatrics welcomed Matthew Alexander, PhD, in the month of January. Dr. Alexander earned his PhD in Genetics and Developmental Biology in the laboratory of Dr. Daniel Garry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. His graduate training focused on the characterization of forkhead transcription factors in skeletal muscle and cardiac progenitor cells. He moved to Boston in 2008 to join the laboratory of Dr. Louis Kunkel as a postdoctoral fellow where he focused on characterizing the role of non-coding RNAs in skeletal muscle diseases. He was promoted to an Instructor in Pediatrics and Genetics & Genomics in 2013. His laboratory in the Department of Pediatrics, division of Neurology, at Children’s of Alabama will be focused on exploring the roles of epigenetic modifiers of human neuromuscular diseases in addition to generating novel zebrafish models of muscular dystrophies for drug library screens.