I was born on Pico Island. Pico is part of the Azores archipelago, which belongs to Portugal. The Azores archipelago is a group of nine islands that are about 800 miles west of mainland Portugal, in the middle of the Atlantic. When I was thirteen my family immigrated to the United States and so on November 4th, 1988 we moved to California. Like most people who immigrate from the Azores to California, my brothers and father got jobs on dairies and so I spent the next few years living and working part-time at various dairies. After high school, I got a full-time job (60hrs per week) milking cows at a very nice dairy in Modesto, CA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While working at the dairy, I attended Modesto Junior College (MJC) part-time and after three years I transferred to California State University Stanislaus where I studied for three more years until I received my BS in biology in May of 1999. The next Fall I began my Masters in Entomology at Washington State University. I graduated with my masters in 2002 and with my Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2012.
I have worked at EWU since 2008. For the first few years, I was a part-time faculty and I conducted NIH-funded research in the department of biology. In 2014 I successfully competed for a tenure track position and began working as an assistant professor in the fall of that year. I was promoted to associate professor in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My immediate family all lives in California. My oldest brother Joe was the herdsman for an all Jersey cow dairy with more than 3000 head for many years. Dairy work is not for everybody, but he truly enjoys it and the pay was good. To have more control of his schedule, Joe started his own business as a hoof trimmer. He is very good at it. My sister Arminda is a registered nurse at Memorial Hospital in Modesto, CA. She received her nursing degree from MJC in 1997 and quickly moved up the ranks. She has been the charge nurse of her floor (post-opp recovery) since 2000. She is continuously offered higher-level management positions and continuously turns them down. She loves working with patients. My brother John worked on dairies and in construction for several years but found that type of work wasn’t for him. In 1996 he became a “trucker.” He drove someone else’s rig for one year and then proceeded to buy his own truck, then trailers. He has been driving the US highways ever since. My mother is a homemaker and lives with my sister. My father passed away in 1989.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I met my wife, Joanna Joyner Matos, while attending Washington State University pursuing my MS degree. We were married in 2002.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was born on Pico Island. Pico is part of the Azores archipelago, which belongs to Portugal. The Azores archipelago is a group of nine islands that are about 800 miles west of mainland Portugal, in the middle of the Atlantic. When I was thirteen my family immigrated to the United States and so on November 4th, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-487","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/lmatos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/487"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/lmatos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/lmatos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/lmatos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/lmatos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/lmatos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":489,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/lmatos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/487\/revisions\/489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/lmatos\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}