Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is Distinguished Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, and Department of Linguistics, UIBE, and Professor, Department of English Studies, Complutense University. He has degrees in linguistics from Lund University (BA), where he also studied English, Arabic and philosophy, and in linguistics from UCLA (MA, PhD), and has previously held positions at USC/ Information Sciences Institute, Sydney University, Macquarie University, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

With researchers around the world, he is working on multilingual studies — including description of particular languages, translation studies, comparative and typological studies; health communication, aspects of educational linguistics, language description, registerial cartography, language arts, the language of space, and the development of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory.

Matthiessen has authored and co-authored over 15 books and 170 book chapters and journal articles. The most recent books are Matthiessen (2021), Systemic Functional Linguistics, Part I, edited by K. Teruya; Matthiessen, Wang, Ma & Mwinlaaru (2022), Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics. Matthiessen & Teruya (2024), Systemic Functional Linguistics: a complete guide (Routledge), Matthiessen (2023), System in Systemic Functional Linguistics: a system-based theory of language. Wang & Ma (2023), Theorizing and Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics Developments by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, provides an overview of some domains of his work.