Matt joined NVIDIA Research in 2018, coming from Google, where he initiated and led the light field capture and rendering project in the VR group for three years. Previously, he has worked on SPMD compilers, started two companies, and worked on both offline and real-time rendering. He has a Ph.D. from the graphics lab at Stanford. His current research interests include the application of machine learning to rendering and real-time ray tracing.

Matt is an author of the book Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation. First published in 2004, and now in its fourth edition, the book has influenced both off-line and real-time rendering, both of which have now generally adopted physically-based approaches. In recognition of the impact the book has had on the movie industry, Matt and the other authors were awarded a Scientific and Technical Academy Award in 2014.

He was previously at NVIDIA at the advent for GPU programmability fifteen years ago. Then, he edited the book GPU Gems 2 and did early work on the use of GPUs for general-purpose computation.