App runs in background in launcher but works fine when in terminal

I've installed several programs in Ubuntu (eg. Matlab) and am trying to add them to the Launcher using Alacarte. "matlab" is in my bin path so I can launch the program with GUI in my terminal.

However, when the app is launched from the launcher only the splash screen comes out and then the main program seems to run in the background (I can see the program name after typing htop). Why is there such behaviour and what can I do to solve this?

I've tried setting (through alacarte) the launcher to launch /usr/local/bin/matlab, tried various combination with the "launch in terminal" box checked and unchecked.