Dr. Christopher K. Mathews is an Oregon State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry. He graduated from Reed College in 1958 with a B.A. in chemistry and the University of Washington with a Ph.D. in biochemistry (1962).
From 1963 to 1978, he was a member of the Yale and University of Arizona faculties.
He became Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Oregon State University, a position he held until 2002.

The enzymology and regulation of DNA precursor metabolism, as well as the intracellular coordination of deoxyribonucleotide synthesis and DNA replication, are two of his main research interests. Dr. Mathews was an Eleanor Roosevelt International Cancer Fellow at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm from 1984 to 1985, and he was a Tage Erlander Guest Professor at Stockholm University from 1994 to 1995.

Dr. Mathews has 185 research papers, book chapters, and reviews in the fields of molecular virology, metabolic regulation, nucleotide enzymology, and biochemical genetics to his credit. He worked on grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Army Research Office from 1964 to 2012.
He is the coeditor of Bacteriophage T4 (1983) and Structural and Organizational Aspects of Metabolic Regulation, and the author of Bacteriophage Biochemistry (1971). (1990). He was the lead author of Biochemistry, a textbook for majors and graduate students, for four editions. He has taught biochemistry courses at the undergraduate, graduate, and medical school levels.