Matthew Faw

Matthew Faw

Ph.D. Candidate at UT Austin

       

Background

I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the ECE department at The University of Texas at Austin, where I am very fortunate to be advised by Sanjay Shakkottai and Constantine Caramanis.

Prior to joining UT Austin, I spent four years at Duke University, where I graduated with majors in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics. During my time there, I had the great fortune of working in several research labs:

  • Datacenter Architecture, Advisor: Ben Lee, January-December 2016
    • Evaluated performance and economic viability of several strategies for system-level computational sprinting for Spark applications.
    • Worked on extensions for co-locating batch and latency-critical workloads.
  • Microfluidics, Advisor: Richard Fair, January-December 2015
    • Designed and fabricated digital microfludic devices capable of manipulating E.coli using magnetic beads within droplet to conduct small-scale biology experiments.
  • Synthetic Biology, Advisor: Nick Buchler, May-November 2014
    • Conducted molecular titration experiments to evaluate several CRISPR-based techniques for creating an ultrasensitive response in gene expression.
    • Designed 3D-printed lab equipment to lower financial barriers to biology research.

I’ve also spent some time in industry. During the summer of 2016, I was a software engineering intern at MathWorks on the Stateflow Semantics team. Between undergrad and grad school, I also spent a year working as a software engineer at a healthcare software startup called Verato:

  • Software Engineer, Verato, McLean, VA, June 2017-July 2018
    • Co-designed and built a custom continuous integration system using Kubernetes, capable of testing hundreds of simultaneous builds of the software stack.
    • Designed software to maintain 300M entry Mongo database and Solr search engine.
  • Software Engineering Intern, Stateflow Semantics Team, MathWorks, Natick, MA, May-August 2016
    • Co-designed and implemented a proof-of-concept architectural change to the team’s code generation process that allowed product extensibility and optimizations that were previously infeasible.

In my free time, I enjoy running and biking, and have completed the 2022 Super Marathon and the 2023 Boston Marathon.