He received his doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University in 2015 and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 2015-2017. Christopher studies the social and economic roots of political inequality, with an emphasis on how health and poverty shape the engagement of ordinary citizens. While in Germany, Christopher is collaborating with Claudia Landwehr (University of Mainz) to study the ways in which depression undermine democratic functioning and with Armin Schäfer (University of Münster) to study how economic inequality leads to political inequality.