He received BS degrees in Mathematics and Physics from MIT and a PhD in Physics from Stanford University. After his PhD he spent a year at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, where he decided to change fields. He became a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics at Oxford, and started doing research in computational biology and mathematical population genetics. From 2004 to 2007 he was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Evolution and Ecology. His recent honors and awards include an NIH Pathway to Independence Award K99/R00 (2006), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (2008) and an NSF CAREER Award (2009).