Matthew Baker grew up in Dunedin, NZ, went to high school in Sydney, Australia, and studied maths and chemistry at the Australian National University in Canberra. He was a John Monash Scholar and after a brief stint at the Vrije Universiteit in Holland, working on kinesins, he used this funding to go to Oxford University where he studied a DPhil in Physics looking at the bacterial flagellar motor - the outboard motor for the salmonella speedboat.