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Matthew is a wildlife biologist withthe environmental sciences' division of URS, a worldwide engineering design firm. Matthew's expertise is with special-status species such as western pond turtles, silvery legless lizards, California tiger salamanders, California red-legged frogs, and western burrowing owls as a wildlife biologist, natural historian, and science writer. He is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, with a Bachelor's degree in Biology, majoring in Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, with a semester abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, studying marine sciences throughout Europe.
For more than three years, Matthew has been working with the San Francisco Bay Area's own Bay Nature magazine as a contributing editor, and has written the Nature's Laboratory column for Shasta County's Shasta Parent Magazine. Each month's Nature's Laboratory column approaches a topic on the natural sciences from all angles in an attempt to make science and nature approachable for parents and their children. He also had the opportunity to intern in the past with the California Academy of Science's California Wild: This Week as a weekly contributor.
In addition to his ongoing freelance writing, Matthew's writing experiences encompass various subject matter, including feature pieces in Inkling Magazine, California History, Berkeley Science Review, California Wild, Faultline, Earth Island Journal, Bibliotheca Herpetologica, and Outdoor California. Additionally, Matthew contributed as a Senior Staff Writer for the Peace Corp's fledgling publication, Jaguarundi, an endangered species newsletter that seeks to help educate Peace Corp. volunteers about the countries they are involved with. Other contributions include a field guide to the dark-eyed junco - life history and nest searching; natural hisory accounts of the western pond turtle and the Baja California and California legless lizards; an array of international environmental topics in Jaguarundi; and extensive literature reviews for the California Department of Fish and Game.
In the summer of 2002, Matthew worked as an Experimental Biology Aide with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife under the Marine Resources Program's Ocean Salmon Management Program. Therewith, he was responsible for collecting effort and catch data to help monitor Oregon's ocean salmon sport and commercial fisheries. Prior to his work in Oregon, he was employed as a Scientific Aide with the California Department of Fish and Game conducting field studies for species such as western pond turtles, California red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders, giant garter snakes, and endangered/threatened Chinook salmon runs. Earlier, in La Jolla, California, he spent a year in Trevor Price's lab researching the urban microevolution of an isolated population of dark-eyed juncos on the UC San Diego campus, and three years at Walnut Creek's Lindsay Wildlife Museum working with the native fauna of California.
Matthew is a member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), The Wildlife Society - Western Section (TWS), the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR), and the International Society for the History and Bibliography of Herpetology (ISHBH).