Matthew Horton
Member Of Technical Staff at Periodic Labs
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatthew Horton is a Member of Technical Staff in Seattle with 12 years of experience building research-grade software and production workflows for materials science and computational chemistry. He moved from leading research software at Microsoft and the Materials Project at Berkeley Lab to an industry role at Periodic Labs, blending deep domain knowledge in VASP-based workflows with pragmatic engineering. A strong back-end developer and open-source contributor, he has contributed security and robustness improvements to widely-used projects like Fireworks and atomate, helping harden workflow orchestration and data pipelines. His background spans postdoctoral research and fellowships at top institutions (Cambridge, Imperial, Berkeley), giving him a rare combination of academic rigor and software craftsmanship. Notably, he pairs that technical depth with practical safety skills—certified as a Wilderness First Responder—reflecting a readiness for hands-on, high-stakes problem solving.
12 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
MSci, BA Hons. (Cantab.), MSci, BA Hons. (Cantab.) at University of CambridgeDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at Imperial College LondonWilderness First Responder, Wilderness First Responder at Longleaf Medical
Stackoverflow
1,376reputation
113kreached
13answers
23questions
Github Skills (28)
python10
databases10
work-flow10
workflow-engine10
queuing10
pymatgen10
task-queue10
queue10
database10
computational-materials-science10
security9
scientific-computing9
configuration-management8
flask-ask7
flask7
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
hackingmaterials/atomate
Feb 2017 - Dec 2021
atomate is a powerful software for computational materials science and contains pre-built workflows.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:11 reviews, 60 commits, 17 PRs in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the atomate software, focusing on workflows for computational materials science, especially within the VASP (Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package) domain. Their commits included modifications to existing workflows, addition of new workflows for magnetic deformation and magnetic ordering calculations, and updates to the VaspDrone for more robust data processing. They also addressed specific issues such as fixing bugs related to incorrect variable names and handling gzipped outputs, improving the reliability and functionality of the software.
sciencecomputational-materials-sciencecomputational-materialsmaterials-scienceworkflows
materialsproject/fireworks
Nov 2017 - Jun 2019
The Fireworks Workflow Management Repo.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 8 commits, 3 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Matthew primarily contributed to the back-end aspects of the Fireworks workflow management system. Their work included refactoring code to remove hard-coded secrets and improve security. The user also addressed minor issues such as printing help messages and added a warning message to the `queue_adapter.py` file to inform users of unused keys in the configuration. They also performed a merge from the master branch.
repo-managementfireworksworkflow-managementworkflow
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