Mat has a background in videogame development before returning to university to pursue a PhD in linguistics and software engineering, where he conducted fieldwork in Taiwan to co-design, develop and test novel socio-technical solutions to assist speakers of endangered indigenous languages.
As a postdoc at Charles Darwin University, Mat worked on collaborative language tasks in cross-cultural settings in remote Arnhem Land, including a suite of mobile phone apps and machine-assisted speech transcription. As a keen maker, Mat also developed hybrid hardware/software solutions to meet the needs of remote collaborative work with the BushPi and Lingobox portable platforms.
As technical lead at Queensland University of Technology's Digital Observatory unit he developed a focus on data collection platforms and large-scale robust digital infrastructures for human data on the web. At QUT he created the NewsTalk platform for harvesting Australian news media, and led development of AusReddit, a platform for collecting and analyzing Australian Reddit data and took the lead in developing research data processing pipelines using generative AI.
Mat is now the principal research infrastructure engineer of the humanities and social sciences digital research hub at ANU, where he leads a team of engineers to deliver digital methods support, with a broader mission to advance the state of research software practice.