Matthew Wolfe is a sociologist who, in 2023, received his PhD from New York University, where he researched the social patterning of and societal reaction to missing persons.  He is currently a National Fellow at New America and writing two books. The first, for Viking Press, examines the Earth Liberation Front and the history of radical environmentalism in the context of the current climate crisis. The second, for Princeton University Press, investigates the history of missing persons in the United States through a sociological framework, exploring how different categories of absence have been sacralized and obscured, including those produced by migration, combat, and enslavement.

His academic research on missingness and social isolation has appeared in Theory and Society and Social Research. His feature writing on criminal justice, missing persons, and institutional failure has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and National Geographic.