Craig Montell

Biography

Dr. Craig Montell is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A. from the UC Berkeley in 1978, and his Ph.D. from UCLA 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) channel family. He was on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHUSOM), where he remained for nearly 25 years. At JHUSOM his group identified the founding mammalian TRP channel. Dr. Montell moved to the UCSB in 2013 as a Duggan Professor of MCDB. He is a recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, an ACS Junior Faculty Award. He received honorary doctorate degrees from the Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium in 2010 and from the Baylor College of Medicine in 2011. Dr. Montell is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in a winner of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award.

Research

Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animals, which spread the parasites and viruses that cause malaria, dengue and other diseases afflicting hundreds of millions of people each year. Craig Montell’s lab focuses principally on Aedes aegypti, which due to climate change and worldwide travel is spreading into new geographical locations each year. The goal of the lab is to devise new strategies to suppress mosquito-borne disease using cutting edge approaches. The lab is defining the cellular and molecular mechanisms that Aedes aegypti use to sense humans and home in on us. The goal is to leverage these insights to interfere with their ability to attack humans for their blood meals. The lab is also developing new approaches to suppress the populations of these invasive mosquitoes to reduce the incidence of mosquito-borne disease.

Selected Publications

Chandel, A, DeBeaubien, N.A., Ganguly, A., Meyerhof, G., Krumholz, A.A., Liu, J., Salgado, V.L. and Montell, C. 2024. Thermal infrared directs host-seeking behavior in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Nature 633, 615–623.

Wang, Y., Thakur, D., Duge, E., Murphy, C., Girling, I., DeBeaubien, N.A., Chen, J., Nguyen, B., Gurav, A.S. and Montell, C. 2024. Deafness due to loss of a TRPV channel eliminates mating behavior in Aedes aegypti males. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121, e2404324121.

Liu, J., Liu, W., Thakur, D., Mack, J., Spina, A. and Montell, C. 2023. Alleviation of thermal nociception depends on heat-sensitive neurons and a TRP channel in the brain. Curr. Biol. 33, 2397-2406. PMCID: PMC10330845.

Ganguly, A., Chandel, A., Turner, H., Wang, S., Liman, E. and Montell, C. 2021. Requirement for an Otopetrin-Like protein for acid taste in Drosophila. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118: e2110641118. 

Zhan, Y., Alonso San Alberto, D., Rusch, C., Riffell, J.A. and Montell, C. 2021. Elimination of vision-guided target attraction in Aedes aegypti using CRISPR. Curr. Biol. 31, 4180-4187. 

Chen, J., Luo, J., Wang, Y., Gurav, A.S., Li, M., Akbari, O. and Montell, C. 2021. Suppression of female fertility in Aedes aegypti with a CRISPR-targeted male-sterile mutation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118:e2105075118.