Matthew Wolfe is a sociologist whose research examines the phenomenon of missingness to ask how structural forces split social networks and how institutions triage resources to repair these breakages through schemas of deservingness. After receiving his PhD from New York University in 2023, he is currently a National Fellow at New America and conducting ethnographic research under a postdoctoral grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation in which he investigates how organizational constraints and heuristic biases shape decision-making within an urban law enforcement agency. His interests include criminology, health, inequality, and emotions. 

His academic research on missingness and social isolation has appeared in Theory and Society, BMJ Global Health, and Social Research. He is currently writing a book for Princeton University Press, Mysterious Disappearances, that investigates the social patterning of and societal reaction to missing persons in the United States, exploring how different categories of absence have been constructed, sacralized and obscured by media and legal institutions. His public sociology on criminal justice and institutional failure has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and National Geographic.