He earned his Bachelor's degree from Lafayette College (Easton, PA) where he worked in the lab of Dr. Shyamal Majumdar using electron microscopy to catalog the fungal diversity of local rivers and streams. In graduate school at Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN), he joined Dr. John Hamer's lab to study the molecular mechanisms of cellular development using the filamentous fungus, Aspergillus nidulans. After finishing his PhD in 1998, he joined Dr. Tamar Enoch's lab at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA) to study genomic stability pathways using the fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe. He is currently using fission yeast to study how eukaryotic cells detect and respond to different environmental stresses.