Craig Montell
Education
- B.A., University of California, Berkeley
- Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Bio
Dr. Craig Montell received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1983. He returned to UC Berkeley in 1984 as a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellow. It was there that he discovered the founding member of the Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) family of ion channels, while working on Drosophila phototransduction. In 1988 he joined the faculty of the Departments of Biological Chemistry and Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHUSOM), where he remained for nearly 25 years. At the JHUSOM his group identified the founding mammalian TRP channel, TRPC1. Dr. Montell moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2013 as a Duggan Professor of MCDB and Neuroscience. He is a recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, an ACS Junior Faculty Award, and has received honorary doctorate degrees from the Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium in 2010 and from the Baylor College of Medicine in 2011. In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2016 Dr. Montell was appointed a Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Research
My laboratory focuses on the control of insect behavior in response to sensory input. We are focusing on the mosquito disease vector, Aedes aegypti, which infects hundreds of millions of people each year with the viruses that cause dengue, yellow fever and zika. We are conducting projects to provide new insights into how this mosquito finds their hosts, and the cellular and receptor mechanisms (e.g. TRP channels and opsins) that allow them to do so. In addition, we are devising approaches to improve strategies to suppress populations of these invasive mosquitoes, and reduce the incidence of mosquito-borne disease.