As a child, Dr. Mathew Angel was on the Clemson campus quite often for academic events, basketball camps in the summers, going to sporting events or visiting faculty members with his dad, who was a high school physics teacher. So, by the time he started his freshman year, he knew his way around.
“I started at Clemson in 2003 as a General Engineering major but left school after my third semester to enlist in the Army for about 2.5 years, deploying to Iraq for a year during that time.”
Angel returned to Clemson in Fall 2007 as a biochemistry major on an Army ROTC scholarship, where he was the involved in and the president of both the Biochemistry and Genetics Club and the Clemson University Student Veterans Association. Upon graduating in 2010 with a degree in Biochemistry and Genetics and a minor in Military Leadership, Angel commissioned into the Army as a Medical Service Corps officer and spent six years as a Field Medical Officer in the Third Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
“I was selected by the Army to go back to school to pursue my graduate degree, so I returned to Clemson on a fully-funded Army educational program (I just can’t stay away from that place for long!) in 2017, still on active duty, and graduated in 2022 from Dr. Cheryl Ingram-Smith’s lab with my Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Ingram-Smith was and still is an amazing mentor for me, and we continue to communicate regularly.”
Angel currently works as an Army Biochemist at the Defense Centers for Public Health – Aberdeen in Maryland, which has the largest public health laboratory in the Department of Defense (DoD). He works in the Molecular Biology Division as the Chief of the Microorganism Analysis Branch. Angel’s lab designs and implements molecular biology laboratory methods to conduct biosurveillance of environmental matrices in order to protect the health of our populations.
“We primarily conduct testing of drinking water and wastewater to detect, identify, and quantify biological threats of interest, specifically human pathogens of concern and antimicrobial resistance markers of clinical significance. We also work to establish wastewater surveillance programs, which I first learned about while I was in grad school at Clemson during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Angel has been involved as the DoD co-lead on wastewater surveillance in developing policy and doctrine at the DoD level as well as forming partnerships and collaborations with DoD and U.S. Government partners. In the wastewater surveillance project, he is using specific technologies, namely quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and next-generation sequencing (NGS) to detect, identify, and quantify the presence of pathogens of concern in our populations.
“This was absolutely not the path I envisioned taking in my career. When I decided to switch majors from engineering to biochemistry, I did so because I enjoyed biology and chemistry in high school and thought it might be more interesting for me to get into the life sciences. At Clemson, I learned indirectly about public health and pathogen surveillance during the pandemic. All that led me to what I’m doing now!”
Angel plans to retire from the Army in about six years, during which time he intends to stay involved in his current public health work. Eventually he would like to move back to South Carolina and is interested in returning to Clemson as a faculty member. Dr. Matthew Angel is originally from Easley, SC, currently lives in Maryland, but loves coming back to Clemson to visit!
