Matt received his B.S. in Organismal Biology from Beloit College in 1994. He received an M.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) from the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then spent two and a half years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno before coming to Purdue in 2006.