He received his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Oskar Painter, and then conducted a year of postdoctoral research with Andreas Wallraff at the ETH, Zurich. As a graduate student, he and his colleagues succeeded in observing the first nonclassical phenomena with optomechanical devices. At Stanford, his group tries to find new ways of harnessing quantum complexity in chip-scale microwave, optical, and mechanical circuits.