He received his Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology in 2004 from the University of Pennsylvania. He did postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute. In 2007, he established his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania where he used a combination of yeast and human genetics to discover new genetic contributors to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In 2012, he moved his laboratory to Stanford University, where he continues his research into mechanisms of neurodegeneration, combining high-throughput genetic screen using yeast as a model system with state-of-the-art neurogenetics approaches to define novel human disease genes.