Originally from Ogden, UT, Matthew began his PhD at CU in the fall of 2019. He obtained a BSc. in mechanical engineering from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT and a MSc. in aerospace engineering from Utah State University in Logan, UT before moving to Colorado to join ORCCA. After working as an intern at the NASA Ames Research Center in 2016, Matthew was an engineer and lab manager at AggieAir, a research lab that designs and builds custom unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for scientific remote sensing. He hopes to leverage this prior experience on ORCCA's drone/asteroid testbed, implementing LIDAR shape reconstruction and model-based navigation algorithms.