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. During his residency, he completed an enfolded CAST-approved fellowship in Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery and a PhD under Drs. Parag Patil and Cynthia Chestek during his resident research time plus an additional leave-of-absence year. After graduation, he completed a one-year, post-graduate appointment as a clinical instructor stereotactic/functional neurosurgery and epilepsy at Stanford University directed by Dr. Jaimie Henderson. Prior to beginning his position as an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Texas at Austin, he is currently a visiting instructor in the Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab investigating intracortical brain-computer interfaces to restore fine motor control in human participants with paralysis.

His clinical interests include deep brain stimulation, MR-guided focused ultrasound, epilepsy, pain. His research interests include brain-computer interfaces, neuromodulation, and computational neuroscience.