Dr. Jerrid Matthews is currently Software Engineer and Technical Team Lead at IBM. He discovered his passion for Engineering when he was a senior in high school; typing random words into the command line of an old computer in his programming class and recording the words that did something on the screen. His high school didn’t receive modern computers until after he graduated. However, it was the hand of a teacher who gave him two programming books (C++/Visual Basic) before he left for College, and that jumpstarted his career.

After his undergraduate career at Michigan State University, Dr. Matthews co-founded Vesta Mobile Solutions, a company that provided media, entertainment, and small businesses the ability to engage with their users through text messaging. Concurrently, he also began his graduate education at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Matthews earned both his Masters and PhD in Computer Science from UCLA and was a member of the Network Research Lab. During his tenure at UCLA, he learned so much about leadership, persistence, and drive. Dr. Matthews now takes those characteristics and uses them to create solutions that will change the world.