His laboratory applies genome-scale and unbiased approaches to study the molecular basis underlying the translational control of gene expression and the roles of this regulation in cellular and organismal physiology. He studied math and biology as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under the supervision of Andrew Murray. As a post-doctoral fellow with Jonathan Weissman at the University of California, San Francisco, he developed the ribosome profiling approach for global and comprehensive measurements of translation. He continued to develop and apply ribosome profiling in his own lab at the Carnegie Institution Department of Embryology prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in January of 2014.