MatthewF.Wilson,Ph.D.
Currently Senior Director of Research Translation and AI Strategy at Baylor's Institute for Global Human Flourishing, where I'm developing AI-powered instruments for wellbeing research.
What I Build
I work on AI systems that solve real problems. Most of my projects fall into a few categories.
RAG Systems and Knowledge Bases
Most of my work involves building systems that let people query their own information. Maybe you have a large document library, a research corpus, internal wikis, or years of accumulated knowledge that's hard to search effectively. A well-built RAG system makes all of that accessible through natural language questions.
I pay a lot of attention to retrieval quality, because that's where most RAG systems fail. It doesn't matter how good your language model is if you're feeding it the wrong context. I also think carefully about chunking strategies, embedding choices, and prompt design, all of which affect whether you get useful answers or confident-sounding nonsense.
Workflow Automation
The other big category is connecting tools into automated workflows. Most businesses use a dozen different software products that don't talk to each other very well. I build the bridges.
I work primarily in N8N, Make, Supabase, and GoHighLevel, though I'll use whatever makes sense for the problem. The goal is always to create systems that run reliably without constant attention, not Rube Goldberg machines that break the moment something unexpected happens.
Prototypes and MVPs
Sometimes you have an idea and you want to see if it works before investing heavily. I enjoy these projects because they're creative and move fast.
I do a lot of vibe coding, which just means building iteratively with AI assistance rather than writing detailed specs in advance. For the right kind of project, this approach can get you to a working prototype in days rather than weeks. It's not the right approach for everything, but when it fits, it's remarkably efficient.
Voice AI and Conversational Systems
This is an area I find genuinely interesting. Voice interfaces are getting good enough to be useful, and there are a lot of applications that make sense: phone systems, scheduling agents, conversational assistants for specific domains.
I've built systems that handle appointment scheduling, answer questions from knowledge bases, and guide users through multi-step processes. The technology is evolving quickly, which makes it fun to work in.
Current Project
FlourishingSurvey
AI-Powered Survey Instrument
FlourishingSurvey.com
The project I'm most excited about right now is an AI-powered survey instrument for human flourishing research. Traditional surveys ask the same questions of everyone and move on.
This system uses conversational AI to ask intelligent follow-up questions based on how someone responds, which lets researchers go much deeper than a static questionnaire allows.
Visit FlourishingSurvey.comBackground
I've had a somewhat unusual path to building AI tools. I spent about a decade in corporate leadership roles at companies like Volvo and Danaher, then pivoted into academic research at Harvard's Human Flourishing Program and now Baylor.
The academic background means I think carefully about what I'm building and why. The corporate background means I care about shipping things that actually work. Both feel like advantages in this space.
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