Matthew Adams is a graduate of Stanford University with a Ph.D. in linguistics. At Stanford, Matthew worked on how and why languages vary and change over time.
Before Waterford, Matthew taught at High Tech High, a charter school in downtown San Diego devoted to project-based learning. In addition to teaching English and history, Matthew collaborated with colleagues on projects that ranged from building parade floats, built by middle school students for local nonprofit organizations, to staging variety shows that demonstrated student learning about multilingualism and the histories of San Diego communities. Before taking a teaching position, Matthew worked as an editor at a Silicon Valley startup, supervising the creation of computer science online courses.
Earlier in his educational history, Matthew completed an M.A. in German literature at Georgetown University, with interests in second language acquisition, post-war German literature, and the German Romantics. While pursuing a double major in linguistics and German at the University of California, Irvine, Matthew spent a year as an affiliate student in Göttingen, Germany, where he began reading German and English literature in earnest.
Matthew is an avid hiker who enjoys writing about travel and human interactions with the natural world. In addition to living in the Bay Area and Southern California, Matthew has lived for extended periods in Düsseldorf, Germany, and Aix-en-Provence, France. Matthew’s wife is a linguist and cognitive scientist, and both enjoy the outdoors, travel, and good Korean food.