My momma named me Matthew, but you can call me Matt. I’m a statistician. Or an applied statistician? Or a data scientist? Let’s just say I do stats.

“Um… what is it that you ‘do’ with stats?”

Currently, I teach statistics at the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University. I’m also a statistics Ph.D. candidate in NC State’s Department of Statistics. For my research, I study regression models for functional data.

In a previous life, I graduated from The Ohio State University.¹

“OK, got it. Is there anything else you do besides stats?”

I spend an exorbitant amount of time talking about baseball and college football—the latter was implied by saying I’m an Ohio State alumnus, right? But I’m often told that I know a lot of random stuff, so I do other things, too. Like eating. Wait a minute, how does eating translate into knowing random stuff?

“What?”

Huh? Anyway, there are hundreds of books on my bookshelf, and maybe only like five of them are about statistics. So I guess I read while I eat… or eat while I read? I don’t know. Multi-tasking is hard. I’m also probably listening to Prince while doing all of the above.

“Prince? Is that why everything is purple?”

Not sure. I was dreaming when I wrote this, so forgive me if it goes astray.