He received his PhD from the University of Colorado in 2010 where he studied nineteenth-century American expansionism and foreign relations. He worked as a historian and writer for the LDS Church History Department from 2010 to 2014 with the Joseph Smith Papers Project and continues to work as an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers project on Administrative Volume 1, The Council of Fifty Minutes and Documents Volume 8. He currently serves as Editor of the academic journal Mormon Historical Studies, He is the co-author, along with Michael Hubbard MacKay, of From Darkness Unto Light 2015. He and his wife Angela have four children.