AMANDA MATTHES
E-mail me at amanda.matthes@gmail.com
about me
I am an engineer at Amodo Design. I have a PhD in computer science from the University of Oxford with the CDT in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems (AIMS CDT) and an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Heidelberg.
Generally, I am interested in any work that could have a large positive impact on humans or other animals. Currently, I think a lot about how to develop better tools (hardware and software) to study the welfare of non-human animals. I would be especially excited to support work that aims to better understand (or maybe even improve) the welfare of wild animals at scale.
things I am doing at the moment
- I am an engineer at Amodo Design.
- I restarted and run EA Sheffield.
links to things I have done in the past
- I organised EA North, a one-day Effective Altruism conference for 35 people around the North of England. In terms of new connections, the event was 12x more cost-effective than larger established events in the space.
- I co-developed SnapperGPS, a small, low-cost, low-power location logging system for wildlife tracking.
- I wrote a mini report on space debris - is it a problem and what can we do about it?.
- I wrote my BSc thesis about my implementation of a superscalar out-of-order processor pipeline in System Verilog.
- Here are some old lecture notes I took during my undergraduate degree that others have found useful.
updates
| date | news |
|---|---|
| 04/2025 | organised EA North - read the retrospective, or the cost-effectiveness breakdown |
| 12/2024 | successfully defended my PhD |
| 10/2024 | submitted my PhD thesis |
| 07/2024 | attended the UFAW International Animal Welfare Conference - read this for some thoughts and numbers |
| 06/2024 | attended the NYU wild animal welfare summit |
| 05/2024 | Ecology and conservation researchers should adopt open source technologies was published in Frontiers in Conservation Science - I co-authored this opinion piece with Pen-Yuang Hsing and Brianna Johns |
| 05/2024 | attended EAG London |
| 05/2024 | gave a talk at the Oxford University Animal Ethics Society on improving animal lives with a tech career |
| 10/2023 | resuming my PhD degree to write up my dissertation |
| 08/2023 | attended EAGx NYC |
| 04/2023 | suspending my degree until Michaelmas Term (October 2023) |
| 03/2023 | attending EAGx Cambridge |
| 02/2023 | the Journal of Open Hardware published our hardware paper on SnapperGPS |
| 10/2022 | attended the Global Gathering for Open Science Hardware, GOSH 2022 |
| 05/2022 | deployed SnapperGPS with Manx Shearwaters on Skomer, Wales |
| 03/2022 | gave a talk at the International Sea Turtle Symposium (ISTS) about tracking nesting sea turtles with SnapperGPS |
| 12/2021 | our SnapperGPS work is featured on the cover of the 2021 Winter edition of Inspired Research, the twice-yearly newsletter published by the Department of Computer Science at University of Oxford |
| 08/2021 | fieldwork in Cape Verde to track endangered loggerhead sea turtles with FMB |
| 05/2021 | voted in as Arts & Culture Officer of the Keble College MCR |
| 05/2021 | voted in as the new Novice Captain of the Powerlifting Club |
| 02/2021 | started hosting our Wednesday talks for the Physics Society |
| 04/2020 | 10-week project with the Satellite Applications Catapult on space debris |
| 03/2020 | voted in as Publicity Officer for the Oxford University Physics Society |
| 10/2019 | started my 4-year PhD at the University of Oxford with the AIMS CDT |
| 08/2019 | at QuID 2019, a summer school on quantum information at the ETH Zurich |
| 07/2019 | interning at the CERN data centre as part of their Summer Student programme |
| 06/2019 | defended my BSc thesis on superscalar out-of-order processing |