He was previously a graduate student in Biophysics with Robert Stroud at UCSF and a postdoctoral fellow with Pamela Silver at Harvard Medical School. His lab is broadly interested in microbial physiology and in developing new tools for the understanding and engineering of biology. For this work, he has been named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow, a DOE Early Career Awardee, and a NIH New Innovator.