Matt joined the faculty of EEOB as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2013. Matt's research spans both the evolution and ecology of crops and their wild relatives with a particular focus on maize and the teosintes. Current research in the Hufford Lab is focused on the demography and local adaptation of ancient farmer varieties of maize known as "landraces", the evolutionary significance of gene flow across taxa in the genus Zea, and genome assembly and comparative genomics of teosinte and the basal grass species Streptochaeta angustifolia.