After high school, I attended the University of Kansas. I graduated in 2005 with a double major in philosophy and psychology. I then attended graduate school at Washington State University, where I completed my masters in science in 2007 and my Ph.D in experimental psychology in May of 2010.
I've known my wife, Sarah, since we were freshmen at the University of Kansas in the fall of 1999. We were married in 2007. She works as a physical therapist, and specializes in shoulder rehab. She is amazing, and I'm excited to give her the chance to meet all of you at the reunion. A little info on that here: https://www.tulsaworld.com/archive/mattson-schraeder/article_5a9e020f-5df6-58cb-b70c-ecd7fcd88bf5.html
After grad school, I taught at the University of Portland (Portland, OR) as a visiting professor for a year. I then got a tenure track position at D'Youville College in Buffalo, New York. We stayed there for two years, then moved back to the Pacific Northwest when a tenure track position opened up at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, WA. I have been working at Peninsula since the fall of 2013 as a professor of psychology. I love working in a community college environment, because it lets me balance my interests in teaching and research without having to play the "publish or perish" game. It also lets me focus on research that I'm really interested in doing, and most of that has to do with applying cognitive psychology to the classroom environment to help out my students - especially the first generation students and nontraditional students who populate the community college system. I'm currently working on a few collaborative research projects with CIRCLE (the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education) out of Washington University in St. Louis to try to find new ways to help students succeed in the college classroom. More on my career and work here: https://www.pencol.edu/faculty-staff/dr-paul-mattson
We have two dogs (pembroke welsh corgis), and we live in a house that is about two blocks from the Strait of San Juan. We love it out here in Port Angeles. It's a great place to live. (And we love visitors!)
Hope to see many of you at the 20th reunion in October!
