Matthew Shoulders grew up in the Appalachian Mountains on a small Virginia farm where he and his five siblings were homeschooled. His father was an accounting professor at Virginia Tech, and his grandfather was a chemistry professor, inspiring Matt’s interest in the subject to which he would dedicate his career.
Matt attended Virginia Tech as an undergraduate, then earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, and got a job offer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2012, where he is now a tenured professor of chemistry studying cellular protein folding.
I first became connected with Matt several years ago when he was building up his lab at MIT. Coming from a rural, religious homeschooling background, he reached out to me because he was curious about urban, secular homeschooling here in Cambridge. 
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