Mathew Schwartz is an Associate Professor in Architecture and Design at New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research and design lab SiBORG(Simulation Biomechanics Robotics and Graphics) focuses on understanding and improving design workflows, especially as they relate to accessibility, human factors, and automation. His research has been published in the fields of robotics, biomechanics, material science, computer graphics, and architecture. He was previously a visiting researcher at Nanyang Technological University and a research scientist at Seoul National University.

Schwartz has investigated a broad range of human-centric topics on architecture and design, including work on the importance of flexible evaluation criteria for environments to accommodate disabilities and novel methods for creating accessibility maps that consider low-level features such as distinguishing between up and down slope, accounting for cross-slope, and differentiating a step up or a step over an object. His recent study investigated how visualization of humans within the building design programming and planning phase can impact ones estimation of a comfortable occupant capacity level. Schwartz has a long history of using motion capture for human analysis and design works, including motion capture data from people with mobility impairments. He has also done research on accessibility of the built environment and modes of visualization for design feedback. His work in biomechanics and motion capture technologies is available as open-source software.

His previous position as a research scientist at Seoul National University (SNU) was within the Digital Human Research Center, which ran the largest motion capture studio in South Korea. In 2019 he was a visiting researcher at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in the Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore (RRIS), where he helped develop protocols and tools for segmenting motion capture data as part of a longitudinal study of a normative movement database used for quantifying evaluations of rehabilitation progress e.g., stroke patients. For the past 12 semesters at the NJIT school of art and design, Schwartz has taught an undergraduate multidisciplinary class “Human Factors”, taken by every student in the school before graduation, which combines lectures and student projects to meaningfully explore universal design, accessibility, and the evaluation of design w.r.t. humans of varying abilities.