He received a B.S. in Chemistry and in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Irvine in 1990 and his Ph.D. in Biology from MIT in 1997 working with Prof. Jamie Williamson on understanding protein recognition of ribosomal RNA and its relationship to ribosome assembly. Before joining the faculty at CU Boulder, he worked in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University as a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Jennifer Doudna. There, he worked on the structure of a ribonucleoprotein complex, the signal recognition particle, involved in protein translocation across and into cellular membrane