Rate My Professor Matthew Wanat

Matthew Wanat, Ph.D., serves as Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor of Record for the Neuroscience PhD program in the Department of Neuroscience, Developmental and Regenerative Biology at the University of Texas at San Antonio's College of Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, and a B.S. in Biochemistry and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin. Prior to his current role, Wanat conducted research at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco from 2002 to 2007 and in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington beginning in 2007. He joined the faculty at UTSA as an assistant professor and was granted tenure with promotion to associate professor in 2020.

The research in Wanat's laboratory centers on drug addiction, learning and memory, the neurobiology of motivated behavior, and stress, with a focus on dopamine signaling in reward-related brain circuits. Using methods such as fast-scan cyclic voltammetry to monitor subsecond dopamine dynamics in behaving animals, his studies explore mechanisms in the nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area, and related pathways. Prominent publications include "Severe stress switches CRF action in the nucleus accumbens from appetitive to aversive" (Nature, 2012), "Chronic microsensors for longitudinal, subsecond dopamine detection in behaving animals" (Nature Methods, 2010), "Transient neuronal inhibition reveals opposing roles of indirect and direct pathways in sensitization" (2011), "Pattern of dopamine signaling during aversive events predicts active avoidance learning" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019), "Nucleus Accumbens Dopamine Encodes the Trace Period during Appetitive Pavlovian Conditioning" (eNeuro, 2025), and "Estrous cycle stage gates the effect of stress on reward learning" (Neuropsychopharmacology, 2026). With 55 publications and over 3,000 citations, his scholarship has shaped insights into dopamine's roles in reward processing, aversion, and addiction vulnerability.

Wanat has obtained UTSA internal funding through seed grants in 2018 and INTRA awards in 2025 and 2026. He mentors PhD students, including NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipients, contributes to the Brain Health Consortium, and presents guest lectures on neuroscience.