Matthew Todd is a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Kavli Institute, working on instrumentation for gravitational wave detectors. His research mainly focuses on understanding and mitigating the effects of thermal aberrations in high-power laser interferometers, with applications to both current LIGO detectors and next-generation observatories like Cosmic Explorer.

He completed his PhD in physics at Syracuse University in 2026, supervised by Prof. Stefan Ballmer. During his PhD, he worked on a variety of topics in thermal aberrations and compensation, laser noise couplings, and design of next-generation detectors