Matthew is the Head of the ARTIS Lab and Associate Professor of Cognitive and Neuroaesthetics in the Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, with a dual affiliation at the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub.

He is originally from the US (Nebraska) where he completed dual undergraduate degrees in Advertising and in Fine Art (with an oil painting concentration), and where he honed his love of the arts, art theory, and the many strange questions that our arts-engagements can bring up.

Following this, Matthew moved from art production into an active scientific focus on how and why art has the impact that it does, completing a Masters and a PhD in Japan at Nagoya University, Department of Information Science, funded by the MEXT fellowship from the Japanese government. There he bridged his love of arts and media theory with a methodological basis in cognitive psychology. In between a stint founding an NGO (Sambaza Group), where he also caught his first interest in policy, he completed Postdocs in Japan and in Copenhagen University before coming to Vienna in 2015.

His initial research focus is on art experiences, especially as these occur in the ecologically valid museum or everyday life setting, and considering the emotionally and cognitively nuanced, the complex, and the especially profound ways we engage art (why would art blow our minds, make us angry, deliver us to insight; make us cry?).

He has developed a number of theoretical models and interdisciplinary research programs focused specifically on the empirical study of such art engagements as these impact emotions, perceptions, cognitions, the brain, and the body. He has since branched out to investigations of art in multiple domains from the lab to the city and in our homes and everyday lives, and also has a long-standing interest in art production and creativity, tackling this in studies exploring how art is made, how our lifestyles or interpersonal differences might impact art making, and how our artistic production or interests might change as a result of neurodegenerative disease.

Matthew is the Coordinator for an EU-Horizon 2020 Consortium project TRANSFORMATIONS: Societal challenges and the arts, combining nine research institutions and societal partners in psychology/neuroscience, art education, and arts policy with a specific focus on the efficacy of arts-based initiatives for changing attitudes, behaviors, and health. He also recently started another transdisciplinary initiative, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and for which he is the Coordinator, “Unlocking the Muse: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Understanding and Applying the Intersection of Artistic Creativity and Parkinson's Disease," as well as projects exploring especially the social-communicative aspects of art and our ability to make empathic connections via the artistic medium, employing functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy and hyperscanning.