Dr Albertson was awarded his PhD from the University of New Hampshire in 2002 for a thesis entitled Genetic Basis of Adaptive Morphological Radiation in East African Cichlid Fishes. He then went on to carry out postdoctoral research on zebrafish developmental genetics at the Forsyth Institute and Harvard School of Dental Medicine. He won the Ernst Mayr Award in Evolutionary Biology, is an NSF CAREER award grantee, has been the Keynote or Invited speaker at numerous conferences, and received the College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Teacher Award in 2016.