Matt Ziegler

I'm an Innovation Fellow at the Ocean Nexus Center and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the UW Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. I finished my PhD in the UW ICTD Lab under Kurtis Heimerl and Richard Anderson.

I research how environmental organizations like NGO's and government agencies can more effectively harness emerging technologies in their work, critically examining their exciting potentials and realistic limitations. Since environmental problems are all ultimately human problems, I focus on technology's role in human dimensions like environmental governance and environmental justice. Before grad school I worked as a technology design/development consultant on various environmental and nonprofit projects; in fields like agriculture extension, primate behavior research, genomics, insect biodiversity, and environmental education.

 

A Cross-Sectional Study of Communication Technologies Underpinning Environmental Institutions
Case Study published at CHI 2025
 

Ocean Nexus Webinar Launch
Designing Equitable Ocean Technologies

Video • Slides
 

AI Language Models Could Both Help and Harm Equity in Marine Policymaking
The Case Study of the BBNJ Question-Answering Bot
Preprint on arXiv
Slides: ChatGPT for Policymakers Workshop
 

PhD Thesis
Communication Technology Reshaping Environmental Institutions

 

“How's Shelby the Turtle Today?”
Strengths and Weaknesses of Interactive Animal-Tracking Maps for Environmental Communication
Honorable mention at COMPASS 2021
Presentation • Slides
 

Can Phones Build Relationships?
A Case Study of a Kenyan Wildlife Conservancy’s Community Development
With Ol Pejeta Conservancy
Best paper award at COMPASS 2020
Short video • Presentation • Slides
 

Who Breathes the Smoke?

Technologies for Community-Based Natural Resource Management

Published at ACM LIMITS 2019
 

Fresh Insights: User Research Towards a Market Information Service for Bihari Vegetable Farmers
Published at ACM ICTD '19 • Slides
With Loop at Digital Green
 

MetaSRA

Find human RNA-seq samples using standardized ontology terms

With Matt Bernstein and Dr. Colin Dewey
 

AntMaps.org

Biodiversity data visualizations
Featured in The Guardian and Science Magazine
Published in Ecological Informatics
With the OIST Arilab
 

GADGET

Search the biomedical literature for genes and metabolites

With Dr. Mark Craven and Sid Kiblawi
 

How To Be a Monkey

Ever wonder what it's like to be a baby capuchin monkey?
Poster at Games+Learning+Society
[Design document]
 

Pastel Drawings
 

Undergraduate Research

Mathematical Models of Circadian Rhythms in Gene Expression Data, and the Regulatory Role of Mop3 in Mice

Identification and Clustering of Genes Expressed In Circadian Rhythms

Proposal: A novel supervised learning algorithm for detection of cis-regulatory modules in promoters and enhancers of ES cells

A Supervised Machine Learning Model for Gene Regulation during Differentiation of Embryonic Stem Cells