Researching Brian Matthews

Matthews and co-stars Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, and Fisher Stevens all made their film debuts in The Burning (1981). That same year, he portrayed the Adult David in the 1981 Broadway musical Copperfield, which flopped. He then played Eric Garrison on the soap opera The Young and the Restless from 1983–1985. He went on to portray Brother Martin on Days of Our Lives from 1985–1986 and David Laurent on Santa Barbara in 1986. Then, he guest-starred in television shows such as Murder, She Wrote and acted in television movies before quitting acting. He then became a therapist and lives with his wife Leslee with whom he has five children. He ran for a position in the Republican primary in Texas in 2012 but lost.

He created hundreds of mutants of T4 lysozyme (making it the commonest structure in the PDB), determined their structure by x-ray crystallography and measured their melting temperatures. Starting from questions about the basis of "temperature-sensitive" mutations, his work has explicated much about the general energetic and structural effects of mutations in proteins. He also solved early structures of the thermophilic bacterial enzyme thermolysin, the helix-turn-helix DNA-binding transcription factor lambda Cro repressor, and the light-antenna bacteriochlorophyll protein.

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.

Matthews has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1986. He is the editor of the scientific journal Protein Science.