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Matthew Tye (born 1986) comes from Handsworth, an inner city area of Birmingham, England. His mother is Vietnamese and father English.
Matthew attended school in Birmingham, taking his GCSEs at Saint John Wall School in 2003, and then studying at the Handsworth Grammar School Sixth-Form until 2005. As a teenager he was known for community work in Handsworth, where he collected a large petition in favour of traffic calming which resulted in the closure of a local road which turned into a Cul-de-sac and the deployment of several safety measures. |
In July 2003, at the age of 16, he was the youngest of six recipients of the Deutsche Bank Spotlight Awards, national awards for teenagers who have campaigned to improve their local communities, and in October of the same year he was highly commended runner-up for the Evening Mail Award for Youth Achievement.
He read for a BA in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he obtained first-class honours. In 2007, while still a second-year undergraduate at Royal Holloway, Matthew was awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship which allowed him to compare provision for elderly people in Vietnam and North America. [1]
In his report, Matthew argued for pro-active government policy on population ageing, commending both the role played by family support in Vietnam and the social security system of Canada. [2]
Also in 2007, the Royal Holloway Academic Awards Group awarded Matthew the Max Cary Memorial Award for a photographic project based on his fieldwork with refugees and asylum seekers in Glasgow. [3]
Matthew graduated from Royal Holloway in 2008 and went on to study for a Master's degree in Comparative Social Policy at Oxford. His research, based at the Oxford Institute of Ageing, centres on "intergenerational transfers, ageing-related policies and welfare states". An article which he co-wrote for the Third World Quarterly Journal in 2009 examining the challenge of ageing populations in Asia was highlighted on the weblog of the International Association for Homes and Services for the Aging. It was also reported by the New York based NGO Global Action on Aging. [4]
While at Oxford Matthew co-founded the Vietnam Academic Network (VAN-UK) in order to promote academic relations between Vietnam and the United Kingdom. He organised the grouping's first international conference, which took place at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School on 20 March 2009. As chair of the first half of the conference, Matthew received guests including the British Ambassador to Vietnam, Mark Kent, and the Vietnamese Ambassador to the UK, Tran Quang Hoan. [5] [6]
In May 2009 Matthew was elected by a cross-university ballot as the Black and Ethnic Minority Students and Anti-Racism Officer on the Oxford University Student Union. His election manifesto carried an endorsement from Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. [7]
Matthew was named in July 2009 as one of 14 students across Europe to receive an AXA Doctoral Research Fellowship. The title of his PhD project is "Increasing Longevity in Vietnam: Strategies for Long-Term Care - the Intergenerational Contract". [8] He is a member of Exeter College, Oxford.
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