Matt Kanan is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University, where he leads a research group that addresses fundamental challenges in energy conversion and sustainable chemical production. Matt grew up in Southern California and attended Rice University for his undergraduate studies. He then carried out Ph.D. studies in organic chemistry as an NSF Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the lab of David Liu at Harvard University. In his postdoctoral work, Matt discovered a class of self-healing electrochemical catalysts for “splitting water” into H2 and O2. Matt joined the faculty at Stanford in 2009.