Born and raised in the Czech Republic, he earned his M.Sc. in organic chemistry with William A. Donaldson at Marquette University and his Ph.D. with Dalibor Sames at Columbia University in the area of C–H bond activation. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Carolyn Bertozzi at UC Berkeley in chemical glycobiology and nanomaterials. Since 2013, he has led his own research lab at UCSD focused on developing carbohydrate-based nanomaterials for glycomics platforms and chemical approaches for tailoring glycan interactions at cellular boundaries. He is the recipient of the 2011 NIH Pathway to Independence Award and the 2015 NIH Director's New Innovator Award. In 2017 he was named Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, Cottrell Scholar, and a New Investigator by the ACS Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering.