Matthew Turner received the BEng degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Surrey in 1996 and the PhD in Control Engineering from the University of Leicester in 2000. After a post-doc he continued at Leicester for several years becoming lecturer, then senior lecturer and then professor. At Leicester he served in various leadership capacities including Deputy Head of Research (Engineering) and Head of the Aerospace and Computational Engineering Research Group.  He joined the Cyber-Physical-Systems Research Group in ECS in March 2020.

Internationally, he is best known for his contributions to anti-windup control - algorithms which augment standard control systems so that they retain stability and functionality in the presence of input constaints (ubiquitous in control systems). His ideas on anti-windup have been applied to various practical control systems and, together with DLR Braunschweig, he was part of several flight test campaigns examining the efficacy of anti-windup compensators for the alleviation of pilot-induced-oscillations (PIO's) in highly augmented aircraft.

For serveal years he served as an associate editor for the International Journal of Control (under the editorship of Prof. Eric Rogers) and has served in various editorial and programme committee capacities for a number of international conferences.