matt wang (he/him)
- email:
mxw@cs.washington.edu- github:
mattxwang- office:
- CSE 464
- office hours:
- Wed 12:30 - 1:20 PM [CSE 121]
- Wed 4:00 - 5:00 PM [drop-in, all welcome!]
- Fri 1:30 - 2:20 PM [CSE 121]
- or, shoot me an email!
đź‘‹ 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 within introductory computing, targeted interventions for the most marginalized students in computing, and developing open-source software & content.
Currently, I'm:
- teaching CSE 121 (intro programming) and CSE 390HA (intro honours) in 24sp
- maintaining Just the Docs and Stylelint (and sometimes (but rarely), RSDD)
- ramping up as a co-editor of the CACM's Education opinion column (with the stellar R. Benjamin Shapiro)
In recent memory, I...
- taught CSE 391 and co-taught CSE 121 (with the wonderful Elba Garza) in 24wi
- taught CSE 391 and co-taught CSE 190W (with the genius Lauren Bricker) in 23au
- was on the panel Interviewing the Teaching Faculty Hiring Process (DOI) at SIGCSE TS 2024 with some lovely panelists!
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 formal and informal 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, Bewitched, 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: Algorithms of Oppression, Because Internet, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Crying in H Mart, Death At An Early Age, Design Justice, Homegoing, Never Let Me Go, Pachinko, Paradox, Piranesi, Stories of Your Life and Others, Poor Economics, The Memory Police, The Food Lab, The Three-Body Problem, Weapons of Math Destruction, What If?
- foods: carbonara, gochujang pasta, Japanese curry, katsu, sushi, tiramisu, udon
- games: Antichamber, Baba Is You, Bloons TD 4, Borderlands 2, Civilization V, Chants of Sennaar, CS:GO, Doom (2016), Hades, Inscryption, Minecraft, Mini Metro, Pokémon Platinum, Portal 2, Skyrim, Stardew Valley, Super Hexagon, Terraria, The Stanley Parable
- movies: Arrival, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ex Machina, Lady Bird, Moonlight, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Strange Brew, The Grand Budapest Hotel, WALL-E
- spelling of favourite: refer to left or above