He received an A.B. degree in Integrative Biology in 1997 from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology in 2004 from the University of Arizona. He was a Hargitt Research Fellow in Cell Biology at Duke University in 2004 and from 2005-2007 a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Genomics. From 2007-20012 he was an Assistant Professor at U.C. Irvine.