Dr. Matt Wood

Matt Wood leads scientific and technical computing at Amazon Web Services in Seattle, Washington, where he drives programs around high performance computing, data-intensive science and big data.

Matt Wood attended medical school at the University of Nottingham, and proceeded to pursue a PhD in Bioinformatics, also at the University of Nottingham. There he studied protein folding and published several articles on protein structure prediction using machine learning. After completing his PhD, Dr. Wood joined the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City as a post-doctoral fellow. He continued to work on bioinformatics research and nascent technologies for working with large databases, and text mining projects.

After returning to the UK from New York, Dr. Wood joined the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to work on the Ensembl genome browser, a joint initiative between Sanger and the European Bioinformatics Institute. Dr. Wood contributed code and new features to the Ensembl code base, and transitioned to the sequencing facility at Sanger as the Head of Production Software.

In this new role, Dr Wood was part of the team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute who deployed one of the largest DNA sequencing facilities in the world, managing petabytes of DNA sequences. He was a contributing author of Beautiful Data published by Media. Dr. Wood continues to be involved in next-generation sequencing, and the clinical impacts of genomics, in his role at Amazon Web Services.

With the completion of the full production platform at Sanger, in 2009 Dr. Wood joined Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com as a Technology Evangelist, where he discussed the technical and business aspects of cloud computing to audiences around the world. He now focused on high performance computing and big data in the cloud.