Dr. Matthew Willsey attended MIT where he received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering with a research focus in digital signal processing. He later attended medical school at Baylor College of Medicine and completed his neurosurgery residency at the University of Michigan in 2022. He completed a PhD in Biomedical Engineering during his 2-year resident research time plus an additional leave-of-absence year. His research focused on intracortical brain-computer interfaces, computational neuroscience, and neuromodulation. After graduation, he completed a one-year, post-graduate appointment as a clinical instructor stereotactic/functional neurosurgery and epilepsy at Stanford University where he conducted research in the Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab directed by Dr. Jaimie Henderson.

He is currently an assistant professor of neurosurgery and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan and is core faculty in the neural engineering cluster of the Biointerfaces Institute and a Michigan Neuroscience Institute affiliate. His research interests include brain-computer interfaces, neuromodulation (deep brain stimulation and spinal cord stimulation), and computational neuroscience. His clinical interests include deep brain stimulation, epilepsy, MR-guided focused ultrasound, and brain tumors. He is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.