He is a board-certified family physician who received his MD from Stanford Medical School, and his PhD in epidemiology from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. He is a former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. He was previously on faculty at UNC School of Medicine and is director of Chapel Hill Doctors Health Care Center in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he offers integrative medicine consultations to people who would like to learn how they might incorporate complementary or alternative medicine approaches into their healthcare plans.