Prior to joining McGill in 2004, he spent three years as a Sherman Fairchild Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He obtained his D.Phil. in Physics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from McGill. His current fascination with quantum information processing was foreshadowed early; as a high school student, he worked summers writing networking software and graphics code for an operating systems company with the curiously prescient, if premature, name Quantum Software Systems. In 2007, he received a Sloan Research Fellowship.