BALTIMORE -- What happens when a scientist walks into a comedy club? If it’s Matt Hurley, he steps up to the mic.
“It didn’t feel good,” Hurley, 31, said of his first times attempting standup in the Baltimore area at places like Wits End Saloon in Timonium and Zissimos Bar in Hampden. That was last February, when the Chicago transplant was beginning to dip his toes into a new world.
Hurley had long been more accustomed to experiments of a different kind. As part of a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University that began in 2018, he tracked how certain biomarkers changed in blood drawn from patients with anorexia, as they gained weight. He’s co-authored papers on topics including “leptin-induced behavioral and molecular changes in rats,” and holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Wisconsin’s Marquette University.
