He received his undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia in 1996. He then worked as a computer programmer in industry before returning to earn his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. He spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University where he studied machine-learning applications to the study of the brain. In 2010 he began as an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University and moved to the University of Virginia in the summer of 2017. As a computational cognitive neuroscientist, his research seeks to develop a comprehensive mathematical understanding of cognition, with a particular focus on human memory and decision-making, that links neuroscience and behavior.