A 2007 MacArthur Fellow, Matsuoka founded Yohana, an independent subsidiary of Panasonic, and co-founded Google X. Her research at the University of Washington combined neuroscience and robotics, a field she termed neurobotics, to develop more realistic prosthetics. She directed Washington's Neurobotics Laboratory and the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering during that period.
Her industry career spanned several major technology organizations. She became CTO of Google Nest, VP of Technology at Nest, VP of Technology and Analytics at Twitter, and held a technology executive role at Apple. Earlier in her career, she was an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington.
