Dr Matthews is a senior lecturer in the Department of Physics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has a PhD in Computational AstroPhysics from the University of Cambridge and completed a postdoc at the Observatory of Paris.

He is currently involved in developing an HIV-AIDS micro-simulation model in collaboration with the Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases Unit of the Pasteur Institute, Paris. This work is partly funded by SACEMA, the International AIDS Society, and the France-South Africa International Cooperation Programme.

He has worked with Prof Wayne Getz (UC Berkeley), Prof Bertran Auvert (INSERM, Paris) and Dr Richard White (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). He was also involved in re-programming the ASSA2000 model into C++ for scientific testing and research, in collaboration with Prof Rob Dorrington and Mr Leigh Johnson of the University of Cape Town. Commissioned research includes workplace AIDS impact modelling commissioned by the Medical Research Council (Durban), Centre for AIDS Development, Research and Evaluation (CADRE), and the Mobile Task Team for the Impact of AIDS in Education in Africa (MTT).

Dr Matthews has been involved with SACEMA since its founding conference in December 2003.