Eric received his B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Eric matriculated at MIT for graduate studies in 2000 and received his Ph.D. in 2005. His thesis work focused on investigating the mechanistic details of palladium- and copper-catalyzed carbon-nitrogen bond forming reactions. He then was an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School with Prof. Chris Walsh where he studied natural product biosynthesis. In 2009, he began his independent career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In August 2016 he moved his lab to UMass-Amherst where he continues to investigate the chemistry and biology of protein ubiquitylation.