Matthew A. Weed, Ph.D. is Interim Associate Director of the Wisconsin institute for Discovery. He earned his B.A. in Political Science, Master’s in Genetics and Ph.D. in Genetics from Yale in 1993, 2001 and 2004 respectively. He also holds masters’ degrees in Public Affairs and Genetics from Princeton and Harvard Universities. Matthew is forging institutional connections between The WID and other parts of the campus, is engaged in the Institute’s budget making process and may act as Interim Director John Wiley’srepresentative to administrators and committees making policy for the Institute.
Matthew has co-invented technology that helped make printed material more accessible to the blind. He has also done a great deal of work with the National Institutes of Health on making the NIH campus and the biomedical data that the NIH generates more accessible to the lay community. His post-doctoral research in bioethics and medical education was done at Yale. He is working to publish data on the level of direct and indirect experience that medical students have with respect to chronic illness and long-term disability. He is interested in developing curricula and opportunities for practical experience that could increase the relatively limited direct awareness that most pre-medical students have of the extra-clinical lives and needs of the patients they serve.
Matthew has been involved in pre-medical advising while completing his graduate and post-doctoral training. He continues to be interested in pre-health care and life sciences advising. Along with his administrative duties for the WID he is engaging with a variety of individual students, faculty and administrators across the campus on the development of programming to help students determine whether careers in the life sciences and/or health care are best for them. He is also interested in helping students see what they will need to do in order to prepare for work in health care and biomedical research.
Matthew has been in Madison since May 15, 2010 and is still learning about the options for activity outside of the UW-Madison campus. He is interested in speaking in the local schools about what it means to face and overcome challenges in one’s life and is working with a variety of people in the local community in order to facilitate doing this. Having grown up in Colorado and spent most of his adult life on the East Coast, Matthew enjoys a range of activities from skiing to canoeing, walking and sculling. He is also in the process of finding choral opportunities, lecture series to enjoy and groups with whom he can see movies, museums, football and hockey games.
A little known fact:
Matthew is the first totally blind and diabetic person ever to have completed a rollerblading marathon. He skated the 1999 NY city rollerblading marathon with seven people acting as sighted guides along the route which did not follow the runners’ course.