He got his Ph.D. from UC Davis in Population Biology in 2008, where he worked out at the Bodega Marine Lab studying how changes in the diversity of predators in the ocean can cascade through whole ecosystems. He was a postdoc at the Santa Barbara Coastal Long-Term Ecological Research site where he fell in love, for once and always, with kelp. But then had a dalliance with data synthesis as a postdoc at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis where he helped co-found the #SciFund challenge to help scientists do outreach and crowdfund their research.