Matt has a long history of research going back to high school. His high school work on the "popular matching" problem (e.g., matching a set of people to jobs trying to satisfy their preferences) has already been cited by several other researchers. At Maryland, Matt has worked on streaming algorithms for clustering and developed a new algorithm for handling outliers. Matt also has worked on various projects in the area of programming languages.

Aside from research, Matt has maintained a near perfect GPA and has had great success at programming contests. He has qualified for the International Olympiad of Informatics three times, winning two gold medals and one silver medal.