Draft:Gregory J. Matthews

Gregory J. Matthews, Ph.D. is an American statistician known for work in applied statistics and sports analytics. Matthews is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and Director of The Center for Data Science and Consulting at Loyola University Chicago.

Biography
Matthews earned his B.S. in Actuarial Science in 2004 and M.S. in Applied Statistics in 2005, both from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He then completed his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Connecticut in 2011, followed by a post-doc appointment at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst from 2011 to 2014.

Matthews joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Loyola University Chicago as an Assistant Professor in 2014. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2020. Since 2019, he has served as the Director of the Data Science program at his current institution.

Work
Matthews has a multitude of publications on various topics in applied statistics, including missing data methods, statistical disclosure control, statistical shape analysis, and statistics in sports. His research papers have been published in prominent statistics journals such as The Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports , Journal of Statistical Software , and The American Statistician.

He is the author of several open-source R packages, including openWAR, a package for evaluating baseball players, and teamcolors, which provides color palettes for sports teams.

Awards
In 2014, Matthews won the March Machine Learning Mania Kaggle competition for predicting the 2014 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. He was also the recipient of the 2016 Contemporary Baseball Analysis Award from the Society for American Baseball Research.

In 2023, Matthews was named finalist of the NFL Big Data Bowl for developing a novel metric called STRAIN for evaluating pass rush in American football. . This work subsequently became an article published in The American Statistician and was named to the ASA Editors' Choice Collection.