He obtained a B.Sc. in Microbiology from McGill University (1989), an M.Sc. in Environmental Biology from the University of Guelph (1993) and a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of British Columbia (1999) under the supervision of Dr. Bill Mohn, where he elucidated the metabolic pathway for plant diterpene biodegradation in Pseudomonas. His post-doctoral studies were performed with Dr. Jay Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley where he engineered E. coli for over-production of amorphadiene, a precursor to the anti-malarial artemisinin. In 2003 he joined the Physical Biosciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a Staff Scientist. The same year, with a philanthropic grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he co-founded Amyris Bio