In '98 he was an exchange student at Cenderawasih University where he witnessed the shooting of fellow students and the subsequent massacre in Biak, earned his bachelor's degree in anthropology and biology from New College in Florida, as a Marshall scholar at the University of Oxford, he studied Indonesian state violence and the provinces of Papua and West Papua, earned his master's of philosophy from Oxford University and now completed his doctoral program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It's expected that he will be publishing a book concerning the issue.