Brian W. Matthews is a biochemist and biophysicist educated at the University of Adelaide, contributor to x-ray crystallographic methodology at the University of Cambridge, and since 1970 at the University of Oregon as Professor of Physics and HHMI investigator in the Institute of Molecular Biology. Beyond his contributions to biochemistry, Matthews is also known in the machine learning community for the Matthews correlation coefficient, which he introduced in a paper in 1975. The coefficient is used as a measure of the quality of binary (two-class) classifications.