He received an A.B. in Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992 and a Ph.D. from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA where he was a charter member of the graduate program in Macromolecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry. Following postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology, he returned to Scripps to join the faculty. He was elected to the Council of the American Peptide Society and is co-chairman of the 22nd American Peptide Symposium to be held in San Diego, California, 2011. He is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Peptide Research and Therapeutics, the Journal of Peptide Science, and Biopolymers: Peptide Science, and he is a board member of the Peptide Therapeutics Foundation and the Scientific Advisory board of Solulink Inc.