Matt Wilkins Email & Phone Number

Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

We are an education studio founded to make outreach easier and more effective. Clients hire us to translate complex knowledge into amazing, open-access lessons for middle school and above. We do the heavy lifting so our clients can connect with students to build a more STEM engaged society. In turn, we help teachers connect abstract standards to the real world, and because we do not sell to teachers (our lessons are open access), we create a more equitable education system.

Nashville, Tn

I was a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt's Center for Science Outreach, working as a resident scientist at Head Magnet Middle. I worked with 5th-8th grade teachers to develop interactive STEAM curricula that engaged students by incorporating authentic data, storytelling and mysteries involving real world examples from current research. I also started the AV Club, where students learned about photography, videography and editing to tell their stories and gain new multimedia skills, and founded the EcoTeam at Rose Park and Head Middle Schools to run the school's recycling and sustainability programs. I also actively published research from my PhD and postdoc, and working on new pedagogical studies on the effectiveness of my curriculum designs.

School Of Biological Sciences

I worked for 3 years in the lab of Dr. Dai Shizuka, and in collaboration with Dr. Eileen Hebets on various projects exploring the evolution of complex sexual signaling in birds and spiders. One major product of this work was the development of a network approach for understanding how selection from competing males and choosy females affects how organisms look, sound, and behave. I also founded and ran the first two meetings of the SciComm conference, which will be in its fourth iteration in 2019.

Boulder, Co

I did my PhD work in the lab of Dr. Rebecca Safran. Titled "Evolutionary Divergence in Sexual Signals: Insights from Within and Among Barn Swallow Populations," this research involved five years of field work in six countries. The focus of this work was to identify the factors that influence evolutionary changes in acoustic and visual signals (in male animals), and assess the degree to which these changes limit hybridization between diverging populations. In undertaking this work, I led field teams to capture, band, measure, and/or record barn swallows in the US, Turkey, Romania, Israel, and Taiwan. Along with Dr. Liz Scordato (Cal Poly Pomona, then a postdoc in our lab), I also performed a ~6000 km transect of Russia, sampling songs from three barn swallow subspecies, and a hybrid zone near Lake Baikal.

New South Wales, Australia

I worked in New South Wales, Australia with a US-based research team that has been studying sexual selection in satin bowerbirds for over 20 years. I helped find and monitor bowers, deploy video camera arrays, exchange tapes and the car batteries powering cameras as needed, capture birds for banding, collect behavioral data, and even assemble microphones. This was extremely demanding physical work, particularly carrying car batteries over rugged terrain, densely populated with flies, ticks, and terrestrial leeches. Despite the challenges, this was the experience that led me to develop a love for field work and ornithology.

Austin, Texas

I worked as a construction assistant with Habitat for Humanity through Americorps, leading teams of volunteers to build a total of eleven houses in the Austin area, and one in Biloxi, Mississippi, as part of a Build-a-Thon to help aid Hurricane Katrina disaster recovery.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Ecology And Evolutionary Biology

Bachelor'S Degree, Double Major: Ecology And Evolutionary Biology And Spanish Linguistics