Matthew Dalva is the Phyllis M Taylor Presidential Chair, Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology, and Director of the Tulane Brain Institute at Tulane University. His research focuses on the molecular mechanisms that organize synapses and enable their development and plasticity. His laboratory has helped define how trans-synaptic EphB/ephrin signaling controls synapse formation and partner selection and used live-cell and super-resolution imaging to discover a modular nanoscale organization of excitatory synapses that changes with synaptic plasticity. More recently, his group discovered an extracellular mechanism that regulates EphB–NMDA receptor interactions at synapses and links this synaptic signaling to injury-induced pain. Together, this work seeks to understand how molecular interactions at individual synapses establish, modify, and sometimes pathologically alter neural circuit function.