matt wang (he/him)
mxw@cs.washington.edu |
github.com/mattxwang
👋 hi! I'm an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.
Broadly, I love computer science and am interested in making computer science education more accessible, equitable, and inclusive.
Right now, I'm especially interested in teaching digital accessibility, improving developer tooling with a pedagogical lens, studying student organizations, broader education policy, and developing open-source software & content.
Currently, I'm:
- teaching CSE 190W and CSE 391 in Au23
- maintaining Just the Docs and Stylelint
- ramping up as a new teaching faculty (and as a new seattle resident!)
past lives
I received two B.S.'s and an M.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles. I grew up in Toronto, Canada, and still maintain my love of winter sports and poutine.
As a student, I was a research assistant at the Northeastern Probabilistic Programming Lab (and PRL) working primarily on RSDD; the inaugural outreach chair for NeurIPS 2022; wearer of many hats at ACM at UCLA and ACM Teach LA; a software engineering intern at CZI, Facebook, Adobe, AWS, Booz Allen, and AudioNotch; and, one of the first employees of the UCLA Makerspace.
Prior to becoming a professor, I've been doing some sort of teaching for about a decade. As a graduate student, I TA'd three quarters of CS 131: Programming Languages at UCLA (with a focus on building course infrastructure and novel content). As an undergraduate, I taught hundreds of undergrads web development through ACM at UCLA and QWER Hacks, middle and high school classes through ACM Teach LA and BEAM at UCLA, and dedicated a big chunk of my life to student advocacy & institution-building. I also developed and taught various workshops at the UCLA Makerspace. In high school, I taught various classes, workshops, camps, and afterschool programs in computer science, robotics, debate, and math.
When I was younger, I had the (admittedly strange) dream job of working for the CFPB or FTC. I'm still interested in a handful of areas surrounding education and health policy, public economics, consumer protection, and antitrust — though I'm far from an expert!
some favourites & recommendations
- albums: Acid Rap, Emotion, Faces, Heard It In A Past Life, Helplessness Blues, SATURATION II, NOT TiGHT, To Pimp A Butterfly, Random Access Memories, Since I Left You, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Tradition, Without Warning, Women In Music Pt. III
- books: Because Internet, Crying in H Mart, Death At An Early Age, Design Justice, Never Let Me Go, Pachinko, Paradox, Piranesi, Poor Economics, The Memory Police, The Three-Body Problem, Weapons of Math Destruction, what if
- foods: carbonara, gochujang pasta, Japanese curry, sushi, tiramisu, udon
- games: Antichamber, Baba Is You, Hades, Mini Metro, Portal 2, Stardew Valley
- movies: Arrival, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ex Machina, Ladybird, Moonlight, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Strange Brew, The Grand Budapest Hotel
- spelling of favourite: refer to left or above