Dr. Matzo is a retired professor and the Frances E. and A. Earl Ziegler Chair in Palliative Care Nursing at the University of Oklahoma College of Nursing. She is a member of the undergraduate faculty at the University of Maryland Global Campus. She was awarded both a master's degree and a doctorate in gerontology from the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a master's degree in nursing from the Gerontological Nurse Practitioner Program at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Dr. Matzo is an experienced hospice nurse; provides continuing-education programs related to death, dying and bereavement; and co-authored with Deborah Sherman the first palliative care nursing textbook published in the United States, now in its fifth edition.

Dr. Matzo is an experienced researcher, and she was the principal investigator on an American Cancer Society–funded research grant entitled Improving Communication About Sexual Health for Adults Living With Serious Illness. She was a Soros Scholar for the Project on Death in America, undertaking a project entitled Undergraduate Nursing Students' Responses to Death Education. She was also the principal investigator on a study of nurses' practices of assisted suicide, and she published a seminal study with Dr. Ezekiel Emanual called Oncology Nurses' Practices of Assisted Suicide and Patient-Requested Euthanasia, published in Oncology Nursing Forum. She was also the nurse investigator with Dr. Susan Block and Dr. Bob Arnold on the study Health Care Providers Responses to Their Patients' Deaths, conducted at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School and funded by the Cummings Foundation. It was a qualitative analysis of health-care providers' responses to their patients' deaths.

Dr. Matzo has presented educational programs both regionally and nationally on many topics related to care of dying people, gerontological nursing and curriculum development. She has published 80 journal articles and 39 book chapters. Her work has been published in Nurse Practitioner, Nurse Educator, Geriatric Nursing, Nursing Homes, Geriatric Psychiatry, The Journal of Gerontological Nursing, Gerontology and Geriatrics Education, Applied Nursing Research, Heart and Lung, Nursing Education Perspectives, and the Geriatric Clinics of North America.

Dr. Matzo retired in 2019 and has since started a nonprofit organization called Everyone Dies. The organization is registered with the Oklahoma Secretary of State with a mission to provide public education on serious illness, dying, death and bereavement and change the culture of dying and death in the United States through educational podcasts. Podcasts have been published weekly since April 2020. Dr. Matzo is also an adjunct professor in gerontology at the School of Integrative and Professional Studies at the University of Maryland Global Campus.