Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he attended Case Western Reserve University, majoring in Physics and Astronomy, and then went on to graduate school at the University of Hawaii. After completing his PhD he spent 6 years as an postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and joined the faculty at USC in 2015. His current research interests rely on the Hubble Space Telescope for observations of distant supernova explosions that are magnified by gravitational lensing.