Matthew Johnston received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2005, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 2006 and 2012. He was a Co-Founder and Manager of Research with Helixis, Carlsbad, CA, a Caltech-based spinout developing instrumentation for real-time PCR, from 2007 to its acquisition by Illumina in 2010. From 2012 to 2013, he was a postdoctoral scholar with the Bioelectronic Systems Lab at Columbia University. He also worked as an Associate at a life sciences venture capital firm, Ascent Biomedical Ventures, in New York City.

He joined Oregon State University in 2014, where he is currently an associate professor with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His current research interests include the integration of sensors and transducers with silicon CMOS integrated circuits, stretchable circuits and sensor systems, lab-on-CMOS platforms, bio-energy harvesting, and low-power distributed sensing.

Johnston was the recipient of the 2020 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Young Faculty Award, the 2021 Oregon State University College of Engineering Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and the 2021 Oregon State University Provost Fellowship. He is currently an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and the IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Systems. He also serves on the Biomedical and Life Science Circuits and Systems Technical Committee and the Analog Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.