He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Materials Science from the University of Utah in alloy development and characterization. In 2008, he completed his PhD at the Colorado School of Mines in Computational Materials Science, where he studied grain boundary properties in aluminum and aluminum alloys. Since that time, his research interests have broadened to include graphene and other low-dimensional materials, lithium ion batteries, and computational techniques for high throughput examination of materials data.