Born in 1919 in Oxford, Massachusetts, Matthew Sands received his BA from Clark University in 1940 and his MA from Rice University in 1941. During World War II he served on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, working on electronics and instrumentation. After the war Sands helped found the Los Alamos Federation of Atomic Scientists, which lobbied against the further use of nuclear weapons. During that period he earned his Ph.D at MIT researching cosmic rays under Bruno Rossi.

In 1950 Sands was recruited by Caltech to build and operate its 1.5 GeV electron synchrotron. He was the first to show, theoretically and experimentally, the importance of quantum effects in electron accelerators.

From 1960 to 1966, Sands served on the Commission on College Physics, spearheading reforms in the Caltech undergraduate physics program that created The Feynman Lectures on Physics. During that time, he also served as a consultant on nuclear weapons and disarmament to the President’s Science Advisory Committee, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the Department of Defense.

In 1963 Sands became Deputy Director for construction and operation of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), where he also worked on the Stanford Positron Electron Asymmetric Rings (SPEAR) 3 GeV collider.

From 1969 to 1985 Sands was a physics professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, serving as its Vice Chancellor for Science from 1969 to 1972. He received a Distinguished Service Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1972. As Professor Emeritus, he continued to be active in particle accelerator research until 1994. In 1998 the American Physical Society awarded Sands the Robert R. Wilson Prize “for his many contributions to accelerator physics and the development of electron-positron and proton colliders.”

In his retirement Sands mentored local elementary and high school science teachers in Santa Cruz, helping them set up computer and laboratory activities for their students. He also supervised the editing of Feynman’s Tips on Physics, to which he contributed a memoir describing the creation of The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Matthew Sands died on September 13, 2014, in Santa Cruz, California.