He holds additional secondary appointments in the Center for Host-Microbial Interactions, Center for Genomic and Computational Biology, and the Duke Cancer Institute. After completing his undergraduate education at Emory University (1992-1996), he received a Ph.D. in Developmental Biology from Washington University under the mentorship of Dr. Stephen Johnson (1996-2001). He then trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Jeffrey Gordon at the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University (2001-2006). Prior to joining Duke, he was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2006-2013).