He received his undergraduate degrees (1996) in human physiology (Hon. B.Sc.) and biophysics (B.Sc.) and a masters degree (1997) in neuroscience from the University of Toronto, Canada. After completing his PhD in neural engineering and neurophysiology at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2001, he did a postdoctoral fellowship in applied nanotechnology to neuroscience at Northwestern University, Chicago (2003). He joined the faculty at UCSD in 2004. His research focuses on investigating cell structure, signaling, and information processing in biological neural networks in health and disease.