He earned his B.S. from The College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. from Florida State University. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the National High Magnet Laboratory in Tallahassee Florida, he joined the CNU faculty in the fall of 2006. His current research interests include the analysis of petroleum related products and other environmentally relevant analytes. He has recently been published in a number of journals such as Energy and Fuels, Environmental Science and Technology, Atmospheric Environment and Organic Geochemistry.