Efforts in his lab are split between building new tools to leverage the power of high-throughput sequencing and cutting-edge microscopies, and bringing these new technologies to bear against basic biological questions of genomic and epigenomic variation. Will earned his PhD in the Applied Physics Department at Stanford in the lab of Steve Block investigating the single molecule biophysics of transcription. As a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Sunney Xie in the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department at Harvard he was awarded a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellowship. He started his lab at Stanford in November 2011, and recently was named a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar.