He earned a Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland in 2009. As an instructor at the ICPSR Summer program, he has been teaching the Regression III course since 2007; he taught one section of the Introduction to R course from 2009-2014; and co-taught the Scaling and Dimensional Analysis course with Bill Jacoby in 2011 and 2013. His research interests focus on measurement and data visualization along with a substantive focus on democracy and state repression. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review and the American Sociological Review and his book on measurement models, "Analyzing Spatial Models of Choice and Judgment with R" (co-authored with Ryan Bakker, Royce Carroll, Chris Hare, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal) was published by CRC Press in 2014.