Matt studies integration, housing, and inequality, with a particular focus on the role of housing policies in fostering integrated communities and promoting ethnoracial and socioeconomic equity. His dissertation has received the 2023 Irving Louis Horowitz Award from the Horowitz Foundation for the overall most outstanding project. In his dissertation research, Matt studies integrated neighborhoods, investigates the consequences of policies that impede integration for impoverished neighborhoods, and explores how housing policies - primarily, zoning and land use policies - can promote residential integration. Through this work, he (along with my adviser, Matthew Desmond) created and made publicly available the National Zoning and Land Use Database, a database of zoning and land use policies covering the period between 2019-2022 for over 2,600 municipalities across the country.

His research agenda seeks to advance our understanding of how policies promoting integration can advance equity, improve intergroup relations, and promote social cohesion within and across communities around the globe. His other research interests are interdisciplinary and span urban planning, migration, the nexus between housing and education policy, intergroup contact, measures of social cohesion, and community-based participatory research. Most of his current work involves quantitative and spatial analysis, but he is also interested in mixed-methods approaches that combine qualitative as well as experimental and quasi-experimental methods to study these topics and inform social policy.